Another Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning Link
Clive Holtham’s KM links page. Also Clive’s home page at CUBS.
Broad and varied range of links included – though no links to original material. Interesting Creativity stuff in addition to usual KM. Can find no reference to his earlier Warp & Weft concepts of Data / Info / Knowledge / Wisdom.
Interesting link to Intelligent Learning Organisation by Chun Wei Choo. The link from Holtham is an old one – to a draft of what is now a book in its third edition. Worth following-up Negative Entropy = Information also Information Processes / Organisational Behaviour / Organisational Learning / Decision Making and the Meaning of Life ! I think this guy has got it. All the right ingredients and a sense of humour – unbeatable. Quote from Nonaka, quoted by Chun Wei Choo in his Digital Libraries Singapore Conference paper based on Chapter 8 of his Intelligent Learning Organisation book.
Quote
The centerpiece …. is the recognition that creating new knowledge is not simply a matter of “processing” objective information. Rather, it depends on tapping the tacit and often highly subjective insights, intuitions, and hunches of individual employees and making those insights available for testing and use by the company as a whole. The key to this process is personal commitment, the employees’ sense of identity with the enterprise and its mission. Mobilizing that commitment and embodying tacit knowledge in actual technologies and products require ….. A company is not a machine but a living organism. Much like an individual, it can have a collective sense of identity and fundamental purpose. This is the organizational equivalent of self-knowledge – a shared understanding of what the company stands for, where it is going, what kind of world it wants to live in, and, most important, how to make that world a reality. … In the knowledge-creating [learning organisation] company, inventing new knowledge is not a specialized activity – the province of the R&D department or marketing or strategic planning. It is a way of behaving, indeed a way of being, in which everyone is a knowledge worker …..
(Nonaka) UnQuote [my bold emphasis]
In other words it reinforces the fact that Enterprise Information Models need a subjective / non-classical basis if they are to be any use.
[Historical Note – Spotted and introduced myself to Clive Holtham at a “PRIMA” conference in London 5 or 6 years ago, where the import of his “soft” paper appeared to go unrecognised in an alien “hard” engineering field in the Process Industries. Looks like he’s moved on to bigger and better things.]