Risks in Knowledge Sharing vs. Bounded Awareness

Rejoice classmates, the midterms are almost done, and the wondrous holiday of Spring Break is nearly upon us! Anyway, the first article I read for this week was Organizational learning and communities-of-practice: Toward a unified view of working, learning, and innovation by Brown and Duguid. This was a pretty nifty article because it talked about how companies view work versus how it actually gets done, which is something I think most students can relate to, amirite? Educators sometimes have an idea about how students should go about learning, and students nod, say yes, and then do their school work in whatever manner best suits them. As Joe pointed out in his post about this article, sticking to a manual, rarely benefits employees or meshes with the workflow. For instance, when I worked at a call center, we would have various trainings on different issues. However, inevitably these different methods we would be instructed to use would affect the company’s call metrics (handling time, adherence, queue volume, etc.) and they would tell us to disregard the changes so that we could clear out the backed up calls. The problem in this case was that the trainers and people making changes were not familiar enough with the job to really know how the changes would affect the bottom line. This disconnect between workers and companies is at the heart of what Brown and Duguid discuss in this article.

The next article I read was Bounded awareness and tacit knowledge: revisiting Challenger disaster by Kumar and Chakrabarti. I wasn’t yet born when the Challenger exploded, but I do remember growing up and hearing about how horrible it was from family members and teachers. Despite the tragic situation it deals with, I really liked this article. Mainly because the idea of bounded awareness seems like it could apply to a whole host of political science stuff. Anyhow, the authors argue that while there are benefits to individual tacit knowledge, it “also plays a role in creating limits on their knowing and inducing bounds on their awareness (p. 946).” Which sounds to me as if, don’t miss the forest because you’re busy looking at the tree.

The last article I read for this week was Knowledge risks in organizational networks: an exploratory framework by Trkman and Desouza. What’s something that KM articles love to discuss? Frameworks! They are like Oprah, in their own tacity knowledge sort of way.

You get a framework!

Everybody gets a framework!

Ahem, sorry it’s late, I digress. So this article is concerned with the risks related to “knowledge sharing in networks (p. 19).” The authors outline how these risks affect the km process, and offer a framework to provide some “structure” to the process in order to reduce any concerns and to better aid companies. Anne’s post here has an excellent write up on this article. I think that this article in particular is interesting because it wants structure, but then if you think back on the article by Brown & Duguid, you see that the structure sometimes adds risk by creating bounded awareness. At least that's how I interpret that, what are y'alls thoughts?

References

Brown, J. S., & Duguid, P. (1991). Organizational learning and communities-of-practice: Toward a unified view of working, learning, and innovation. Organization science, 2(1), 40-57.

Kumar, A., & Chakrabarti, A. (2012). Bounded awareness and tacit knowledge: revisiting Challenger disaster. Journal of Knowledge Management, 16(6), 934-949.

Trkman, P., & Desouza, K. C. (2012). Knowledge risks in organizational networks: an exploratory framework. The Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 21(1), 1-17.