Posted by Yogesh Malhotra on July 19, 1997 at 23:38:21:

In Reply to: Re: How to Facilitate Dialog & Knowledge Creation? posted by Jeff on July 14, 1997 at 15:03:32:

How about checking out Nonaka and Takeuchi's* "middle-up-down" model of organizational knowledge creation. This model is explained in Chapter 5 of their book, citation of which is listed below. In the explanation of this model, they emphasize that::

"Simply put, knowledge is created by middle managers, who are often leaders of a team or task force, through a spiral conversion process involving both the top and the front-line employees (i.e. bottom). The process puts middle managers at the intersection of the vertical and horizontal flows of information within the company."

The authors argue that the front line employees are most immersed in the day-to-day operational aspects of the various organizational processes, they may often not have the advantage of the 'bigger picture' or may not be equipped to communicate the importance of their insights even if they are organizationally relevant. In this situation, middle managers facilitate this unstructured profusion of insights toward (organizationally) purposeful knowledge creation by providing the subordinates with a conceptual framework to make sense of their own experiences.

"In the middle-up-down model, top management creates a vision or a dream, while middle management develops more concrete concepts that frontline employees can understand and implement. Middle managers try to solve the contradiction between what top management hopes to create and what actually exists in the real world."

They further elaborate the contrast between the top-down management, bottom-up management and the proposed middle-up-down management by illustrative case studies of GE, 3M and Canon.

They emphasize that in a knowledge-creating company, everyone is a knowledge creator - including all the hierarchical levels mentioned earlier. However, they suggest an alternative classification to the one based on the hierarchical classification into top, middle and bottom levels. This classification consists of three categories of players:

Knowledge practitioners: are responsible for accumulating and generating both tacit and explicit knowledge. Those who interface primarily with tacit knowledge are "knowledge operators," while those who interface primarily with explicit knowledge are "knowledge specialists."

Knowledge engineers: are responsible for converting tacit knowledge into explicit and vice versa, thereby facilitating what they describe in their book as four modes of knowledge creation, specifically socialization, externalization, internalization and combination (also discussed in their Organization Science paper).

Knowledge officers: are responsible for managing the overall organizational knowledge- creation process at the corporate level.

* Nonaka, I. and Takeuchi, H. The Knowledge-Creating Company, Oxford University Press, New York, NY, 1995.

Nonaka, I. "The Dynamic Theory of Organizational Knowledge Creation," Organization Science, 5(1), February 1994, pp. 14-37.

---

Follow Ups:

---

Click Here to Post Follow Up in New Forums

    Knowledge Management Think Tank (New)

  

 Subject: 

Message: