Tacit knowledge in rapidly evolving organisational environments - Draft
Tacit knowledge in rapidly evolving organisational environments
It will be argued here that phenomena which have appeared in two widely differing
organisations suggest that parallel evolution is occurring in different contexts conditioned
by the wider context of ICT development and other trends associated with the concept of
Post-Modernity. The outcome of these developments is that constant updating of the selfimage and self-knowledge of the organisation becomes part of the day-to-day knowledge in-use of front- line practitioners and that in combination with these practitioners' clientcentred approach this process in turn feeds back into the evolution of the wider
organisation, the phenomenon designated by Claudio Ciborra as Drift.
Post-modernity is taken to be the abandonment of the model of society as moving
towards a rational division of labour aimed at meeting the natural needs of rational Man.
This model was associated with an assumption of the fixity of a number of social spheres
and economic sectors which were based on the centrality of different principles or
technologies. In retrospect these phenomena can be seen as products of the clustering of
various subsidiary functions around central functions as a result of problems of spatial
and temporal co-ordination and transaction costs. Associated with this were productcentred enterprise and the assumption that organisational change primarily arose from
technological advance within different sectors.
ICTs had the initial effect of bringing into prominence the concept of the Value-Chain.
This means that different technological platforms in the process from raw materials to
finished goods and services can be linked on the basis of profitability and criticality while
lower transaction costs and despatialisation allow out-sourcing of staple inputs. This
paradigm has spread from for-profit to not- for-profit sectors because of its benefits in
cost-reduction and responsiveness to final outcomes. A further twist in this process takes
place when organisations abandon all concept of a central product and instead define
themselves as providers of solutions. We draw on the experience of two 'solutionproviders', one for-profit and one not-for-profit. The subordination of all of the products
and services offered to the concept of a solution or transition leads to a greater role for
the front- line practitioner in deciding what inputs are required and how to source them.
This can only take place within a context of ICT- mediated communication and in a
context of standard-setting and information sharing.
The necessarily personal use of tacit knowledge is a factor in the inescapable element of
drift which arises in this context. The need for practitioners to consider every individual
case drawing on their individual knowledge of the accessible competencies and capacities
of the organisation means that a succession of choices between the possible solutions to
the client's problem's has unpredictable outcomes for the dynamics of the wider
organisation.
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Tacit knowledge in rapidly evolving organisational environments - Draft
Tacit knowledge as unde rstood in management and organisation theory
Tacit knowledge has been discussed within management theory in a contrast with explicit
knowledge. In this context explicit knowledge is usually itself under-defined. If we look
at an organization top-down, we can expect to find a wide array of legal, technical,
commercial and insurance-related documentation of the ownership, property, machinery,
goods and contractual relationships of the organisation, and descriptions of its processes
and the roles of individua ls in those processes. So ostensibly the organization has a body
of explicit knowledge which describes what it does and how it does it. If we look at
explicit knowledge bottom- up, we could find that a starter in the organization is
immediately confronted with a highly signed environment, with a wide range of traffic
and safety signage, departmental and personal nameplates, and maps and diagrams of
work procedures and flows. We need to ask, how do these masses of texts and signs
become knowledge? Obviously only by being read, and by being read and understood,
and by being read and understood as relevant to a particular context.
Explicit knowledge is thus always specific to the ability and habituation of the user to
acquire and absorb information from the media used. This generally requires literacy, in
one specific language, and even when signage is designed without script, it still assumes
a basic familiarity with some conventions of signage itself.
There are a number of reasons why explicit knowledge may be fully explicit both in
terms of being codified and expressed in a common language, and may actually be talked
about on a day-to-day basis, and yet may come to be posited in fact on a whole number of
assumptions and presuppositions, the taken- for-granted-ness of which is lost sight of by
the participants. This is one of the forms of so-called 'tacit' knowledge analyzed by
Boisot, namely that of an in-group idiolect which does not question its own assumptions
until forced to do so by organizational change or co-operation with another organization.
Once uncovered, this phenomenon may also turn out to simultaneously be an instance of
the second of Boisot's categories, that of knowledge which can be made explicit but only
at a non-negligible cost. 1
The third of Boisot's categories is that which he considers to be Michael Polanyi's own
use of the term. In our view unfortunately, he considers this to be knowledge which is
irretrievably 'tacit', in the sense of necessarily implicit. In his system there is a hard core
of knowledge which cannot be made explicit. This is a serious limitation of Polanyi's
insight. When Polanyi says that "we know more than we can tell", does not simply mean
that there are things we, personally, tacitly know but cannot express. How people ride
bicycles or swim, or walk and eat, are things which some people can perfectly well
explain and which anyone can begin to learn about. Polanyi would agree that what we
tacitly know is infinite and thus inexhaustible. In fact this is also true of what we
explicitly know and all the inferences which we could draw from it. However, the more
immediate point of Polanyi's statement was that there are two ways of 'knowing' and that
what we tacitly 'know' can be paralleled and communicated by explicit knowledge and
explicit knowing without this ever replacing the mode of tacit knowing.
1
2
See Boisot 1998 pp.56-57.
Tacit knowledge in rapidly evolving organisational environments - Draft
We will explain the full details of Polanyi's concept later, but for now the important point
is that tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge are not divisions of a single container of
knowledge, so that when one grows the other shrinks. They are two modes of knowledge.
Knowledge is information. Both tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge can be
duplicated. Explicit knowledge can be duplicated in a variety of media, but tacit
knowledge can only be duplicated in human beings through the processes known as
apprenticeship in the widest sense. The recovery of explicit knowledge from its material
embodiment in printed or digital symbols is itself a process requiring tacit knowledge of
systems of language, literacy, propositional thinking and symbolism. There are also
systems of apprenticeship in these skills.
Automation was a leading factor in creating an assumption that productivity
improvement was a management- led top-down process. In recent decades the importance
of the transfer of tacit knowledge by the movement of workers has been highlighted by
the literature on clusters, which has drawn on Marshall's older work on industrial
districts. Silicon Valley and Central Italy have been seen as examples of areas within
which new technical knowledge has been rapidly diffused and has served as a basis for
competition to be concentrated on product design, boosting the competitive advantage of
the cluster as a whole.
Tacit knowledge within ne w contexts of market responsiveness
Interest in clusters as sources of competitive advantage has combined with wider policy
trends towards privatization and the use of market forces to lead many large corporations
to introduce market principles into their internal arrangements. These processes
somewhat parallel the way in which large Japanese corporations have out-sourced some
of their inputs to firms with which they maintain cross-shareholding and developmental
information sharing. This means that the dichotomy between Western and 'Eastern'
(actually largely Japanese) approaches to the value of tacit and explicit knowledge (in
whatever sense) has been softened by a convergence towards more complex relationships
between and within large organizations and supplying contractors. 2
An example of the drive to introduce market principles into both the working of a
government service and its relationships with its users is the UK government Connexions
service. The aim of the service is to facilitate the transition from school to work for all
13-19-year olds in England, with equivalent services in the other parts of the UK to
converge on this model in time. All personal, family, sexual, legal, drugs, disability,
housing, educational and training problems are to be dealt with by a one-stop service
oriented to the individual, with co-operation between all kinds of professionals and a
reduction of the stigma arising from the need for help in more sensitive areas since the
service is universal.
2
Nonaka and Takeuchi 1998 investigated this East-West dichotomy in the appreciation of Tacit
Knowledge. For a case study and an introduction to the wider literature see Lincoln & Ahmadjian 2001.
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Tacit knowledge in rapidly evolving organisational environments - Draft
The Connexions service has been organised around the concept of the Connexions
Advisor. This is a new professional profile which is intended to unify the roles of careers
advisor, family support workers and young people's support workers. These advisors are
themselves each seen as possible 'one-stop-shops' in that a young person may in the first
instance establish contact with any advisor through a number of institutions, hotlines, or
outreach projects, and this advisor will then begin to set in motion whatever processes are
necessary to address the young person's problems. While individuals with particular
profiles of problems may be attached to an advisor who is a specialist in these problems,
most should be able to maintain a relationship with the first advisor with whom they
come into contact.
The Connexions service presents itself as a product brand which appeals to potential
users as a service to which they are entitled and which they should take up. This general
trend in presentation of all government services is more extreme in the Connexions
service because of the age of the target group and the corresponding assumption that they
are more likely to use the internet, mobile phones and texting than older groups, and that
they are subject to a wider range of alternative claims on their attention which the
Connexions service must challenge on the common ground of consumerist culture and
media styles.
Parallel investigations of the use of competency and personal development systems
within the Connexions service and within a major IT company gave rise to interesting
and surprising parallels. 3 Despite the obvious differences between a profit-oriented
corporate business serving principally other corporate clients and a government-provided
service aimed primarily at individuals, a number of similarities could be observed in the
processes which arise when the individual units of alrge organisationmay take differing
steps to adjust their responsiveness to client demands. Knowing the location and
relevance of clusters of expertise within the wider organisation becomes an important
aspect of the tacit knowledge of each section, while the old methods of spreading best
practice become problematic since the different units may be applying their practice in
significantly different contexts.
The UK Connexions Service Context
The Connexions partnerships are thus an example of a general trend in UK public
services sector delivery and a precursor of wider developments in the same direction. The
main components of the service are:
a)
b)
c)
3
4
An on-line one-stop advice shop
A universal service offer for all members of the target group, in this case, all young
people aged 13-19, and,
A range of deeper services, some available on demand, others taking over statutory
roles when required, which deal with all of the problems of the target group in
moving towards the goals set by policy
Jones & Miller 2004 and Failla & Mazzotti 2004.
Tacit knowledge in rapidly evolving organisational environments - Draft
The objective is that all young persons despite any disability, personal problems, family
problems, or problems in relating to institutions, should make a successful transition from
full-time education into the labour market either directly or through further and higher
education.
The aim of the one -stop shop approach is to include as many as possible of the special
services which young people may require within the blank et service and thus reduce all
stigma arising from labelling. Since the career service is a universal institution that does
not in any way stigmatise its users, it was regarded as the most appropriate service to
provide the wider context within which the specialist advice, help and guidance is
provided.
This change is not merely cosmetic but gives rise to a fundamental redefinition of the
occupational roles of all those involved. Those previously in the careers service were
always oriented towards pastoral guidance for those who found entry into the adult world
problematic but now the normal and the problematic cases are regarded as a continuum.
Conversely, those advisers previously occupied with help, support and guidance for
individuals with specific prob lems are finding that they are operating within a framework
with a definite goal, the successful transition of all individuals from education into the
labour market by age 20.
In this context there has been some concern about the cut-off point of age 20 and what
may happen to the more vulnerable individuals after the Connexions service ceases to be
responsible for them. A general criticism of target and goal-based systems is that they
distort priorities and produce a manipulation of targetted outcomes which may not be
effective in the long-term. In the case of the UK Public Employment Services, this led in
some cases to the placement of individuals in employment which was predictable to be
short-term. While there are arguments for keeping individuals in touch with the labour
market even if only on a short-term basis, overall this kind of system has been seen as
responding to perverse incentives and wasting resources which should be devoted to
preparing the individuals for more secure employment. The 19-20 cut-off is seen as a
potential danger due to the possible production of equivalent perverse incentives to rush
individuals into non-permanent placements in work or training in the run- up to the end of
the service’s responsibility for them.
The Connexions service currently operates through 9 regions in England. Within these
regions are 47 areas where 151 partnerships are operating. Human Resources
management is located at the area level and each area can employ between 500 and 1000
personal advisers. The Connexions Partnerships are of two kinds, Direct Delivery and
Sub-contracting. The latter breaks down into two sub-groups, the ‘Basket of Services’
model and the ‘Thematic Support’ model.
In Direct Delivery areas, a single organisation takes the contract for the delivery of all
Connexions services. In these areas, the local Connexions partnerships are divisions of
the area partnership. The management services of the partnership and the face-to-face
delivery of the services to clients are all carried out by the Direct Delivery organisation.
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Tacit knowledge in rapidly evolving organisational environments - Draft
In Sub-Contracting Areas, the face-to- face services to clients are carried out by subcontractors working for the area Connexions partnership. The way in which this is
organised can take two forms.
a) In the areas operating the ‘Basket of Services’ model, the local Connexions
partnerships contract to provide the Connexions service for a local district within which
they are responsible for all services to clients. Some of these contractors are local
organisations which developed out of government service providers. Others are purely
commercial organisations which submit multiple tenders for services in a number of
different areas and localities. The Connexions partnership for the area is responsible for
ensuring that these sub-contractors deliver the services and for providing them with a
number of management services including human resources.
b) In the areas operating the ‘Thematic Support’ model, sub-contractors do not provide
area-based services but specialist services such as careers guidance, drugs advice, or
specialist workers for the hard-to-reach clients. The area-based Connexions partnership
remains the provider of general services for the whole area.
These different business models cut across distinctions of urban and rural settings and
also do not correlate to the number of partnerships within an area.
Connexions Direct presents itself as a website which offers advice through web-chat,
texting and telephone communication on an 0800 number. Advisers will also ring out to
users who text or email their telephone number. Connexions Direct began operating
before the Connexions partnerships were fully established. The relationship between
Connexions Direct and local Connexions partnerships is probably very uneven nationally
and determined by the perceived strengths and weaknesses of the different agencies in
different places.
Connexions Direct is not the only Connexions website. Most of the area Connexions
Partnerships have developed their own websites and use these to communicate directly
with their local target audience and to provide services to their users. These websites are
very varied in their visual design and approach.
Many Connexions advisors are located in schools where they exercise a variety of
functions. Schools have a Connexions budget which is intended to be allocated locally in
consultation to provide a mixture of full-time and part-time, generalist, specialist and
outreach services. Schools have begun to complain that careers advice for the entire
school population has begun to suffer as a result of the skewing of both budget provision
and the actual take- up of Connexions resources towards problem children and special
needs. 4
4
e.g. Ward 2005. It seems unlikely, however, that any future restoration of a dedicated schools career
advice service would result in the abandonment of the wider Connexions advisor approach.
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Tacit knowledge in rapidly evolving organisational environments - Draft
The National Occupational Standards (NOS) for Connexions are clearly derived from the
Functional Map for the service. The functions which the organisation is statutorily
required to carry out have been mapped and the occupational profile is a direct iteration
of this mapping. More precisely, there is a mapping of the common and shared functions
which are common to all professions providing support services for children, young
people and their families. The professionals were consulted on the mapping of these
functions but within a context which ultimately derives individual functions from the
organisational imperatives.
The National Occupational Standards work from the Key Purpose of the organisation
through a number of Key Roles, which are themselves broken up into units and elements.
Within each Element there are Performance Criteria, a Knowledge requirement and a
Range indicator.
Connexions Advisers will generally be qualified at NVQ 3 or NVQ 4 level in a relevant
or related area of work before beginning their work with Connexions. They will progress
through the Introducing Connexions course which is a short overview of the service and
its relationship with other services and then progress to the Understanding Connexions
course which will bring them up to an NVQ 4 level on the wider system of Connexions.
Those working with harder-to-reach young people will generally be expected to
undertake the Connexions Diploma, which is an H.E. Diploma also on level 4 of the
NVQ system.
The Connexions service has been given the responsibility of developing a common
language and a secure database for the sharing of data on the cases of children and young
people between the various agencies involved. However, part of the problem of
developing systems for competency mapping and performance mapping of the individual
advisors and units within the Connexions service is that much of the data concerning
problems and outcomes of individual cases is client-confidential. Such data is therefore
not directly available to the personnel departments for detailed assessment.
Part of the role of the Connexions Adviser is to be aware of the resources available to
help them in carrying out their tasks. This implies that keeping up with a wide variety of
legislative, scientific, procedural and market knowledge is an essential part of the
occupation. This knowledge will be disseminated within Connexions by a variety of
bulletins, seminars, and websites, but the onus is on the individual adviser to take
advantage of this information and know how to find and interpret it.
However, the Connexions Adviser will also need to be aware of what skills and
knowledge they can call upon from colleagues in their area. This is not a simple matter.
Connexions Advisors work through a variety of modalities. Some are full-time, some
part-time, and some work part-time for a number of different Connexions services or
partner organisations making up a full-time job. Most are employees but many are
freelance. A single large school may contain three or four Connexions advisors employed
on different systems and with different remits. Schools and other qualifying bodies such
as youth clubs may have a budget for Connexions advisors which is renegotiated each
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Tacit knowledge in rapidly evolving organisational environments - Draft
year. Colleagues may be working together who belong to statutory organisations,
charities, commercial contractors, municipal offshoots working under commercial
contract, or bodies in the process of privatisation.
The IBM Context
IBM has evolved from a business machine manufacturer to a computer manufacturer,
then to a computer system developer, and now identifies itself as a computer system
consultant. Its business consists in finding and implementing solutions to client's needs
using new technologies on the interface of communication, data management, and
process management. In 1994 it began implementation of the Customer Relationship
Management system (CRM). 5 This means that development of an answer to a business
opportunity becomes the responsibility of a single individual, the Opportunity Owner,
who takes responsibility for carrying out the whole project. They will then have the
responsibility of using the entire IBM Information Warehouse to find the necessary
collaborators to process the development. As part of a general trend towards supplying
consultancy rather than hardware or software, this means that they will be seeking
individuals with knowledge and skills in the areas of processes and products similar to
those of the particular client in order to develop a complete business solution for the
client organisation. This change has influenced the skills mapping and the professional
template used within IBM as it has become necessary to co-ordinate skills within the
organisation with the processes of clients rather than with the contours of IBM - internal
production and development processes.
In 2003 IBM's $36 billion turnover was composed of 45% services, 34% hardware, 16%
software, 4% financial services, and 1% other services. The expansion of the services
share of turnover is expected to continue.
The framework for skills management in IBM comprises IBM Foundational
Competencies which are common to all employees, Basic/soft skills, of which 16 are
used, divided into three groups, Business, Leadership, and Relationship skills, and
Professional Core skills, which are each specific to a particular profession or job roll and
of which there are more than 25,000. IBM currently has some 319,000 employees
globally, distributed 167,000 in the Americas region, 100,000 in the Europe, Middle East,
Africa region, and 49,000 in the Asia Pacific region.
The competency profiles of individual employees and working groups are databased and
provide a pool of information which can be used as a resource to draw up a pool of
potential collaborators in any new undertaking. However, it is recognised that even this
level of mapping of competencies does not provide an immediate match for the relevance
of experience in one area for application in another. Therefore the Opportunity Managers
and Opportunity Owners are encouraged to make their own investigations of exactly what
competencies and knowledges are present in other parts of the organisation. One facility
to encourage this is the Intranet Customer Room, where experience with particular clients
is pooled between different Opportunity Owners. It has been realized that central
5
8
See Ciborra & Hanseth 1998 and Ciborra & Failla 2000.
Tacit knowledge in rapidly evolving organisational environments - Draft
production of a compendium of these things would merely create a rapidly dating
resource which could become an obstacle to the development of new and possibly
creative encounters between different units and individuals. Instead there is a database of
solutions, which is not to be used simply as a document of what has been done in the past
but should lead to communication between units to compare experience and to discuss
the relevance of past solutions to new problems.
The outcome of these steps is that Opportunity Managers and Opportunity Owners should
not be reliant on higher management to delegate tasks within a development project or to
pass on historical knowledge about similar cases. It is part of the work of the Opportunity
Managers and Opportunity Owners themselves to find the right people and to exchange
information about the client or about other comparable development processes. This is in
part because a global organisation of the size of IBM could not rely on purely informal
exchanges to produce sufficient information flow simply because of the large number of
units and employees. But it is also a recognition of the value of the tacit knowledge
which is built up through both success and failure and which cannot be captured by any
compendium.
Tacit knowledge as a navigational tool within complex changing organisations
The two case studies, originally undertaken in order to investigate the value of
competency mapping tools for the organisations concerned, gave rise to a realisation that
there was a new kind of tacit knowledge arising within large organisations of ostensibly
quite different types arising from the parallel processes of internal organisational
complexity and the need for small units and individual professionals to work in a clientcentred way within the constraints of a number of differing outcome requirements. As a
first approximation the two organisations investigated appear to display the following
common characteristics:
1. The practitioners operate within a context of tension between the wider goals of
the organisatio n and the immediate needs of the clients they are directly in contact
with. In a general sense this may always have been the case but managing the
tension between these potentially conflicting goals is increasingly filtering down
to become a direct respons ibility of the front-line practitioner. 6
2. The drive to provide the client with a one-stop shop or a single contact for a
product development puts the practitioner under the obligation to constantly
review the degree to which they can manage the interaction within their existing
skills and whether the resolution to any problem is to extend their skills or draw
on the skills of others.
6
Failla 1996 displays an earlier stage of this process within the evolution of IBM. The shift of the RNSL
software production unit from producing bespoke software for individual clients to adapting one of four
'mega-products' to client needs increased the complexity of the task of the client interface while reducing
the complexity of the internal development and production processes.
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Tacit knowledge in rapidly evolving organisational environments - Draft
3. The professional needs to have and constantly update a map of the availability
of skills and competencies within the organisation. A complete explicit map of the
availability of skills is of relatively little use here, because (A) both the level and
the location of available skills is under constant evolution and (B) the need for
this knowledge cannot be satisfied by reference to an encyclopaedic reference
work, since any such compendium necessarily abstracts from the specifics of the
use of skills, which is precisely what is relevant to their application to a new
problem.
This is the context within which we will return to a deeper investigation of the ideas of
Michael Polanyi in order to develop an approach to the interaction between tacit
knowledge and explicit knowledge, specifically to how practitioners make use of the
massive bodies of documented or databased explicit knowledge about their own
organisation and the skills and competencies of its members.
Implications of the continual interaction of explicit and tacit knowledge
Michael Polanyi was fully aware that there is a continual interaction of tacit and explicit
knowledge. The clearest expression of this is his discussion of the process of learning to
interpret pulmonary X-ray images. The medical student progresses from seeing nothing
but a few shadowy ribs to being able to intuit the implications of subtle spidery patterns
for the health of the lungs. This is not done by a process of dumb induction, simply
comparing the images with real lungs and implicitly developing a mapping of
characteristics from one medium to the other. It is mediated by language, so that every
development of explicit knowledge through verbal instruction is linked with the display
of actual cases while the student is also only able to follow the verbal instruction because
the examples give substance to what is initially incomprehensible jargo n.7
Tacit knowledge is not a special stock of knowledge alongside explicit or implicit
knowledge. It is knowledge in activation in a particular context and under the imperative
of achieving particular goals. It is this which makes tacit knowledge 'ineffab le' or
inexpressible: not any hidden quality of the knowledge itself, but the fact that it only
comes alive and makes sense in an active context of goal-directed action. To make this
entire context explicit would be an infinite task. But tacit knowledge is not simply
implicit knowledge either. Large parts of tacit knowledge may have originated in explicit
knowledge and may be reproducible as explicit knowledge, but in use this knowledge
becomes tacit by being backgrounded while the individual focuses on the goals they wish
to achieve. The attunement of the individual to the achievement of these goals within the
given context is inseparable from the person's commitment to that particular context as
one of their contexts, and it is this attunement which can only be acquired by action.
Polanyi begins from the fact that the greatest part of our knowledge is subservient to our
goals and actions. It is in the background but is not called on in the form of statements.
Most of what we do, we do on the basis of routines which are familiar and within which
7
Polanyi 1958 p.101. The following exposition draws mainly on Polanyi 1958, but Polanyi 1966, Polanyi
1969, and Polanyi & Prosch 1975 have been consulted.
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Tacit knowledge in rapidly evolving organisational environments - Draft
we follow established patterns and familiar heuristics of interpretation of what is taking
place. We cannot focus on the knowledge necessary to accomplish these actions without
detracting from the performance itself, ‘putting ourselves off’. When we have to
concentrate on a skilled action we are mostly focusing on what could go wrong rather
than on the positive components which are necessary but which can be taken for granted.
This is tacit knowing but what is tacit knowledge? If we looked at our knowledge from
the point of view of logical implication our knowledge could be said to be infinite.
Linguistics tells us that we can generate an infinite number of sentences. Does that mean
that we ‘know’ how to do this? Knowledge of classes of things can likewise generate
infinite propositional statements. In Polanyi’s way of thinking there is no ultimate
distinction between ‘knowing that’ and ‘knowing how’. Knowing how to carry out a
skilled performance of any action includes having the capacity to generate a potentially
infinite stock of judgements about the progress of the action and the possible risks and
causes of failure. 8
For Polanyi the process of 'From-to' knowing is always part of a process of achieving
something. Polanyi considers that there are two stages in the tacitness of knowledge.
When we are engaged in any action we focus on the aim and we background all of the
conditions of success of the action unless a problem arises. But we also focus through the
object of our action on the ultimate aim for which the action is undertaken. Whether the
action is proceeding adequately is not generally determined by a fixed idea of what the
physical form of the outcome should be but on whether it is an adequate basis for the next
stage of a continuous chain of actions. In modern society we have become accustomed to
see action through the paradigm of the manufacture of a series of almost- identical and
interchangeable objects. This is a misleading paradigm for the teleology of most human
action, which is not driven by a blueprint but by adequacy to a goal. This final goal is
itself subject to shifting conceptions of what success would consist of and how to achieve
it. Connexions and IBM are examples of the move away from the old paradigm.
Polanyi uses the word ‘commitment’ to signify the fact that in order to meaningfully
doubt any particular thing, we must make prior commitments to the validity of a wide
range of other things. We can never question and investigate the vast range of
assumptions on which our life is based. There is a further stage of commitment, which is
indwelling. Indwelling means accepting a particular context as a context which defines us
and which will continue to be involved with us. As we develop our goals and aims, and
the habits and heuristics which we need to achieve them, we become embedded in and
determined by the contexts which we choose. We can only develop our powers and
aptitudes in adjustment to particular contexts, which are not neutral environments.
Because they are human creations they embody human teleologies and in becoming part
of them we absorb the aims and goals of our context. The process of achieving goals is
also a process of formation in which the understanding of how to achieve goals can lead
to a process of redefining goals and of what would count as achieving them.
8
"These two aspects of knowing have a similar structure and neither is ever present without the other. This
is particularly clear in the art of diagnosing, which intimately combines skillful testing with expert
observation.", Polanyi 1966 p.7.
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We have a fund of knowledge about objects and processes which is embedded in our
commitment to values, contexts and goals. Personal knowledge is thus a process of
continual development and discovery which is also a continual process of adjustment of
the individual to their contexts.
The tools which we use, both physical and mental, become extensions of our body. In the
case of tools, we adjust our propriosensory settings so that we process the information
received as being ‘out there’ as we do with sight and hearing input. In the case of
heuristics we also make the reality of their postulates part of our world, like assuming the
solidity of floors and chairs, and we experience an equivalent shock when they are
invalidated. This is another part of commitment, which arises because we cannot
constantly check all parameters and values. We must take some things for granted in
order to be able to apply ourselves to action.
The information from prostheses, the blind person’s stick, the rower’s oar, the carpenter’s
screwdriver, the punter’s pole, a bent probe used to investigate an inaccessible recess, are
not experienced as events in or on the user’s hand and fingers but as data about what is
really there in the appropriate part of space. This is not surprising as we also locate our
own hand not solely by information from the hand but from the entire arm and body. We
learn to interpret the messages from our nerves as being ‘about’ our hands and fingers
only by patterns of correlation between visual and kinetic information of grasping and
manipulating objects. We learn to interpret a particular pattern of pressures on our
fingertips as being ‘about’ something six inches away or a pattern of pressures on the
palms of our hands as being ‘about’ something six feet away. We have simply become
accustomed to associate this pattern with the feel of the screw encountering hard, soft or
rotten wood, or the pole encountering stone, clay or soft mud.
Polanyi considers that our heuristics work in the same way. We have expectations about
the likely future actions of rocks and chairs, trees and animals. We each have a
differently tuned set of these expectations based on our experience of these things. This
affects both the expectations we have and the way in which we classify things into
classes giving rise to different expectations. The heuristics of higher level skills are
similar. Such heuristics are an extension of the self into the world. We experience the
same feelings of shock and harm when our most familiar heuristics do not ‘work’ as
when we sit on a chair and find that it collapses. Our reasonable and normally reliable
map of the world and our place and potential for action within it are sudde nly upset.
Heuristics are thus the limit case of how body and mind work together to produce and
experience tacit knowledge.
Heuristics in the management of client-centred processes
To unite our themes of the appearance of similar phenomena in two ostensibly widely
different forms of organisation, and of the interaction of tacit and explicit knowledge, the
heuristic is the actual form of operation of the 'knowledge' which is notionally embodied
in the organisational mapping of an institution. Information systems only come alive
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Tacit knowledge in rapidly evolving organisational environments - Draft
when they are used by individual practitioners to develop their plan of action in meeting
the needs of particular clients. There is already an analogy in the parallel by which the
needs of a client may only be gradually disclosed so that a plan of action for meeting
their needs may develop new branches or may be completely recentred by the emergence
of new more pressing needs.
Against this target the practitioner has to put together a team of collaborators from a pool
of colleagues and units which they know to be experienced or to be in the process of
developing experience in particular fields of work. They also have to gauge the pressure
of work which these individuals or units may be experiencing. The inherent technical
knowledge of collaborators also has to be weighed against their experience in dealing
with the particular problems of the particular kind of client. This in turn can involve
knowing that one kind of client can often turn out to be a different kind of client as the
process develops. In a context of compartmentalised provision there was always the last
resort of referral to another professional or service. Manufacturers can always say, well,
we don't make them . The system consultant and the one-stop shop practitioner no longer
have these options.
The Connexions service has the remit to ensure the school- to-work transition of all 13-19
year olds in England. It will refer its clients to appropriate medical and legal
professionals and services, housing or educational authorities but these referrals are never
final. The service always remains responsible for monitoring the outcome of these
referrals and ensuring their success. The service as a whole is thus the site of first and last
resort for all of the problems of its cohorts. And within this context the total
responsibility of the organisation as a whole is delegated to the individual advisor. They
become responsible for mobilising all of the resources internal and external on which the
service can call. They cannot do this by constantly referring to encyclopaedic reference
books and directories. It is inevitable that one of the most important tasks of the advisor
is to maintain a mental map of the most common pathways on which their clients will be
travelling
IBM has no legal responsibility to accept all business opportunities which arise. In fact
one of the responsibilities of the Opportunities Manager within the CRM is to decide
whether a particular opportunity flagged by a representative is worth pursuing. However,
new opportunities presenting new problems may also present valuable data on the way in
which business system needs are evolving. Having moved on from hardware to software
and then to consultancy, IBM cannot dictate what kind of problems it will provide
consultancy on without risking being left behind by newly emerging trends. Of course
IBM has experience in managing the risk involved in open-ended development projects,
and problematic client requests will be looked at by the relevant specialists. Nevertheless
becoming a consultant inevitably means opening the organisation to the pull of external
dynamics. IBM has put itself into a position where it will have to navigate these without
the internal structure which was once provided by the existence of given product lines
and by final higher decisions about new product development.
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Tacit knowledge in rapidly evolving organisational environments - Draft
Claudio Ciborra argued that this drift could be positive and creative if it is experienced
against a background of a platform such as is provided by the standards and systems
which allow feedback on what is happening to be used creatively in the wider
organisation. 9 These examples may be seen as a paradigm of a new type of organisation
which, within overall imperatives and standards, is open to drift generated by the
expressed and elicited needs of its clients. Interestingly, this parallel seems to hold both
for real paying clients, such as those of IBM, and for users who are given the status of
clients as part of a strategy to make take- up of services part of a consumer culture and to
banish the stigma of dependency. Within these organisations the need to bring together a
range of professional advice and knowledge to provide a unitary response to the client's
needs leads to the growing importance of the tacit knowledge of each individual on the
interface with the client about the structure of the organisation and its component units
and collaborators. The need to provide solutions to problems which arise in the course of
the client relationship means that every such worker builds up a picture of the possible
collaborations and referrals they can make. Precisely because the organisation is
constantly evolving in response to new needs, the tacit knowledge generated by contact
and collaboration in client-centred work becomes indispensable. It cannot be replaced by
centrally disseminated data, but it is possible to create structures which facilitate the
channels of lateral communication.
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