Posted by Andrzej Góralczyk on January 01, 2004 at 18:53:02:

In Reply to: Does Everything That Humans Manage Have a Shared Definition? posted by Jim Nash on November 02, 2003 at 11:33:21:

I'm very surprised reading this discussion. There seems to be a big misunderstanding not about knowledge but about management.

If you have something exactly defined, there is no need to manage it. You can count it, control it (switch on or off for example), process data about it, but not manage it. Do you manage the packs of sugar on your shelf or the light in your kitchen?

The room for management is only if you have something undefined, uncertain, unrealiable - have variation at least. The art of management is to tackle with the uncertainity, to make decisions uder the condition of uncertainity. Often you need to define roughly something what was udefined to make it subject to your decision; and a management is necessary only if such a definition is incomplete or inaccurate. You need to define goals, the actions, tasks and responsibilities to attain the goals etc. - to roughly define what was not defined before. If you are smart manager, you always estimate the risk, which is the measure of uncertainity (roughness), or the measure of undefined.

We manage people because people are not automates, and we can't define people exactly!

What about tacit knowledge? Of course we have no precise defition. But having no definition doesn't imply that tacit knowledge doesn't exist. And what is one of the main tasks of knowledge management? It is to make tacit knowledge common - that means to make it explicit: roughly definable and communicable.

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