Do you know what you know? In many situation we act without even knowing why we act the way we do. If this is true for one person, what would this mean for an organizations?

In business, the management of knowledge is not a primary business activity and therefore difficult to manage: The attention for the topic doesn't normally last long. And than it is just another supportive task, like accounting, administration, human resources: everybody needs it, but not the whole organization is aware of that.

Nonaka and Takeuchi have expressed that two processes are very important when managing knowledge; externalization and internalization. They refer to a process of making tacit knowledge explicit (by dialogue using words and metaphors, etc) and once this knowledge is made accessible to others it will be internalized - the employee will do what he or she has learned and this "doing” will be sort of new habit. It is not the same as "learning by doing;” that applies more to a process of implicit learning. You follow someone else and than you how to do it. You are not explicitly aware of what you have learned.

In order to manage knowledge you should start to know what you know. This is like making an inventory. But if you make an inventory you are addressing the supply side of knowledge. The demand side of knowledge is normally where the bottleneck resides. And this could be very well because of a recent change - like reorganizations for example.

As mentioned, knowledge management is not a primary business, so the chances are that the organizational structure has been changed and only once every thing is "back to normal”, then the knowledge management issue is addressed. This is to fill the (knowledge) gap that has been caused by the structural changes.

The next step is to examine the structural change and to take action.

© 2006 Hans Bool