Introduction
Thinking for a living. More and more of us are paid to think.
Men and women have always thought.
Until now, few have had the luxury of being paid to think.
This book is mostly about work - a particular kind of work that requires thinking. So a few words at the beginning about thought and what it is will put us on the road to understanding knowledge work.
Thinking involves language. When we think we articulate and make explicit what we take for granted. In knowledge management, what we take for granted is called tacit knowledge. Thinking is done for a purpose - to get something done, to do work.
Knowledge and Management
This book is not only about work . . . it is about knowledge and how it is managed. In that sense, it is a book on knowledge management, with the term used, we hope, in all of its richness.
Knowledge management means at least four different things to the growing number of professions trying to get a handle on the emerging new kind of work:
Librarians, records managers and archivists - those who make up the information services profession generally use the term knowledge management more or less synonymously with information management
- the acquisition, storage, arrangement, retrieval and use of information. Information management, for these fields, deals with managing data in a context and focuses on the content of documents. These fields also understand the importance of a “body of knowledge” - a term used by settled sciences, like physics and chemistry, and professions, like medicine and law, to refer to the knowledge associated with their profession. Knowledge management, according to this view, is what information professionals have always done - it focuses on the content of information. It is not about technology, but about content.
Engineers and information technology professionals, on the other hand, see knowledge management as a technology which develops and delivers knowledge management systems. These systems are technologies, generally software, that enable an organization to use information more extensively by using data mining, collaborative tools and telecommunications. Web technologies give us new and exciting ways to manage information more robustly The information technologists also focus on what some call an integrated digital environment - the technical environment necessary to make full use of the advances in communications and computer technology.
Both of these two groups - the IT and information service professionals see an important part of the picture. They are correct, as far as they go. However, in their literature and in their practice they make the mistake of using information management and knowledge management more or less interchangeably. We think that managing information and managing knowledge are two profoundly different activities.
Knowledge requires judgment. As we shall see, a knowledge statement is an answer to the question - “Is it a good idea to . . . ?” Knowledge management cannot be automated since it requires discernment, judgment and decision making. What are often now called “knowledge management” systems are increasingly efficient and robust information management systems. Managing knowledge is qualitatively different from managing information.
Most knowledge management, in its current (early) incarnation, is really a kind of forms management . . . taking information/data and comparing it, contrasting, checking, and capturing it in an information system.
“Knowledge management” in this sense should probably be called information management. This form of “knowledge management” uses technologies such as data mining to identify patterns in large quantities of previously unrelated data Finding patterns is an important part of information management, but patterns alone do not give us knowledge.
Anthropologists and learning theorists, a third group, approach the topic of knowledge management from a different perspective. They focus on learning how workers acquire knowledge. They focus on the community of practice,3 one of the key concepts that enables us to understand the nature of knowledge work. A related notion, that of the learning organization, focuses on the importance of on-going learning that replaces traditional training.
Management theorists, a fourth group, talk about knowledge management from the world of management theory. Peter Drucker introduced the notion of the knowledge worker more than two decades ago. Some of the best work on the impact on management is by Ijuitsu Nonaka, the Japanese theorist who brought the term “ba” to the discussion of business theory and practice. The business theorists also speak of the importance in making the tacit knowledge of an organization explicit and developing ways to capture the tacit knowledge of an organization.
Each of these four views is important and I hope to encompass and integrate all of them in the following chapters. These professions and disciplines bring new concepts, such as integrated digital environment, knowledge work, and communities of practice that help us to understand and conceptualize the transformation in work that is underway.
The immediate impetus for me to write this book came from a three-year project I led to create an integrated digital environment for the United States Air Force. Terry Balven, a wonderful military professional, provided the direction for the Air Force and writes about that project in an appendix to this book. Colonel Balven and I came from two totally different worlds - but as sometimes happens when cultures from different professions and bodies of knowledge overlap an environment for great creativity can emerge. We did some wonderful things together as we tried to figure out how technology can best be used to create a new environment for work.
After ending my participation in that project, I invited some of my colleagues to write about what we learned and had come to know. One of these, Evie Lotze, has written a wonderful companion book to this one called, Work Culture Transformation. She looks at the problem of work transformation from the world of psychology and myth. As she points out, the left side of my brain is particularly active as I struggle to make logic and sense out of our world - a task she prefers to undertake using the tools of myth and fairy tales. I end this book by pointing you to hers.
When I was freed from the day-to-day demands of the project, I was able to delve into the literature of business and management theorists, the anthropologists and learning theorists and the technologists who speak of knowledge management and the knowledge age.
When I tried to make sense out of these disparate, yet related, views, I returned to my original discipline, philosophy, and to my experiences over the years seeking to transform organizations and the social order. Philosophers know what knowledge is . . . something which seems to baffle most of those who write about knowledge management and do not use the term “knowledge” with much rigor.
For more than two thousand years knowledge has been understood as “justi?ed true belief.” Philosophers have a whole field called epistemology - the theory of knowledge. Even though there are many unresolved questions in that field, the de?nition and understanding of what knowledge is remains fairly constant. Knowledge has to do with judgments that we make based on evidence . . . and if we believe that we know something we also assert that what we know is true and we have evidence for its truth.
“Managing” knowledge does not make much sense if we use the philosophical de?nition of knowledge - for it is not possible to “manage” beliefs. In the course of the Air Force project, we found ourselves saying that “My knowledge is information for you.” This formulation enables us to see the relationship between knowledge and information - for information management has to do with making the content of a body of knowledge accessible for those who need it to do their work.
I use information to make knowledge and if I know something, my judgments may add some credence to you when you use it as information for you to come to the judgments you make as you do your work.
The Role of the Intellectual
From my perspective, this book has been thirty years in the making, long before anyone linked terms such as “knowledge” and “work” and “community” and “practice,” or integrated,” “digital,” and “environment. The book started in 1972 as a part of a series of articles, some of which were published, written in the tradition of the continental thinkers in the 1920's - Gramsci, Korsch and the man who most in?uenced my intellectual and personal development - Georg Lukacs, with whom I was privileged to work as a young philosopher in Budapest in 1968.
In the post-World War I period, monarchies passed away to be replaced by democracies and socialist regimes of various kinds, new political and social cultures bloomed around the world, and a lively and vibrant intellectual life thrust intellectuals into the very center of political life. One of the major questions of these thinkers, and for all progressives of that era, was the proper function of the intellectual. These thinkers were all intellectuals and the answer to the question of what intellectuals should do was intensely personal as well as theoretical. For me, the problem of the role and function of intellectuals is best understood as a problem of knowledge management.
Forty years later, in the 1960's, many intellectuals were once again thrust into the political world and struggled to answer the question: “What form of organization is appropriate for knowledge and action to be effective?” We were politically active and intellectually curious - two traits which we believed went hand in hand.
Like many other young people of the time, I was involved in both intellectual work and political activity. In l970 I published a book which summed up the conviction held by many that a new democratic theory was developing in both the East and the West. The new democratic theory would replace the outmoded theories of dialectical materialism and liberal democracies.
Although the political changes did not happen as we thought and hoped, the next forty years brought profound changes that left us with a very different - and new - world in which to live. For the next two decades, after writing the book on political theory, I was involved in very practical political and organizational activities and, later, I developed an increasing fascination with the role and function of information and information technology as an enabler of a new way to do work. In 1983, I walked away from a tumultuous, frustrating and satisfying life as an activist and union president. I had come to know power first hand - how to gather it and how to exercise it. I returned, for a while, to a life of study and contemplation.
I spent nearly a year in the Library of Congress trying to integrate the theory and practice of the transformation of professionals from freestanding thinkers to employees of institutions. I recalled the words of Lukacs during a full day of the two of us walking together in the Hungarian woods. He discussed how even the most abstract thought had practical impact. As he loved to say, “whether or not we solve a particular theoretical problem will not determine whether the revolution will come, but it might make it a little better, a little more humane, when it does come.” That advice has motivated my continuing interest in theory - not abstract theory, but theory that comes from and is related to practice.
In 1982, I began writing a book that would be based on empirical studies of what some in the sixties called the “proletarianization” process: the premise of the proposed book would have been that professionals are becoming, not a “new class,” but part of productive labor, i.e., part of the working class (the proletariat). The same process of proletarianization and industrialization that Marx described in Capital would, so I thought, apply to these new members of what we, at that time, called “the working class.” The same process that peasants went through when they entered the working class applies to intellectuals as they left their freestanding status and became a part of industrial firms as workers.
Tow Truck Operators
In the midst of doing theoretical work, because I needed to make a living, I found myself responding to a request by a group of tow truck operators to help make them into a profession. The practical problem of the tow truck operators was one that I could solve. I thought I knew what a professional does - think for a living. What surprised me was seeing new professions emerging just as the “thinking” professions took on jobs in companies and institutions and became what we now call knowledge workers. The tow truck operators taught me a very important lesson: the proletarianization of the thinker is but one side of the process. Perhaps more important and more interesting is the rise of many new professions
- professions of people who are paid to think, paid to take the knowledgeof others, use it as information, and formulate new knowledge. As one of the towers explained to me as I watched him teach others how to haul a large truck out of a deep ditch, “It is just physics.” Their knowledge takes others' information, processes it through their skills and experience and answers the question: “Is it a good idea to . . . ?” Workers who were once in “menial” jobs are now professionals, a process that we examine in the ?rst chapter.
It was only later that I came to use the term “knowledge worker” to describe the people who are paid to think.
In 1988 I was invited to return to Florida, where I had been organizer and president of a union representing 8,000 faculty and professional employees, to speak at a conference sponsored by the University of Florida - an institution that had fired me (and many others) fifteen years before for our political and social activism. The title of my talk was “Thinking for a Living” - and much of the second chapter of this book is taken from that talk.
Information Technology
By the late 1980's, I had already launched a career in information and began to become familiar with - and fascinated by - the development of information technology. I became a part of the growing ?eld of information management and worked to bring technology to the workplace.
As I worked, I thought often about that unwritten book with the title “Thinking for a Living.” In 1999, I fell into one of my most interesting jobs
- to create an integrated digital environment for the United States AirForce. Working with members of the military introduced me to many new worlds and to some of the brightest people I have ever met. We came from very different cultures, but we all worked together to try to figure out how to make appropriate use of technology.
This project brought me deeply into both the theory and practice of knowledge work. I was able to bring gifted people together to think and work practically. We concluded that creating an integrated digital environment (one in which we have immediate access to the information we need to do our work) requires a transformation in the work culture.
When that project ended, I returned to the Library of Congress reading room to immerse myself in the literature of knowledge management, change management, and the new “?elds” that developed in the last decade. I revisited the topics I considered a generation ago, armed with some new language to help understand a new way to do work.
Transformation
Many people and disciplines observe, discuss and advocate various kinds of transformation. Integration of a number of concepts from various disciplines and practices is the key to work transformation. As the familiar story goes, when a group of blind men touched various parts of the elephant, each described a very different “beast” - one said it was a smooth, pointed animal, another that it was a rough, pliable, thin-skinned one, a third said, no, it was a snake-like beast, long and slim, another opined that it was massive, thick and tough. I hope to provide a sighted-man's view of the elephant.
I am aided in writing this book by a number of important works in anthropology, education, philosophy, business management, psychology, cybernetics, and information technology. It is the integration of these ?elds that will provide the theory and practice of the new culture that supports knowledge work.
Like knowledge, this book develops spirally. If you read it with your “browser” on, both literally and figuratively, you may dip into the book, then wander off to other “sites” of interest. You might then spiral back and read some more. A book is, by its very nature, serial in character. There is an argument presented here that moves, hopefully, in a logical fashion. I hope it will stimulate your thinking and you will get information from lots of sources, apply your critical thinking facilities, compare it to your experience, contrast it to the accepted norms and turn it into knowledge.
And I hope it contributes to the theory and practice of the growing field of knowledge management