Hargadon – Action and Possibility: Reconciling Dual Perspectives of Knowledge in Organizations.

Cite:

Hargadon, Andrew and Fanelli, Angelo. “Action and Possibility: Reconciling Dual Perspectives of Knowledge in Organizations.” Organization Science 13.3 (2002): 290-302.

So this article turned out to be pretty interesting. The 50,000 ft. view is that this paper explores the dichotomy of two different models of knowledge management in organizations: organizational learning and innovation. Without getting too much into it, organizational learning deals with the idea that individual experiences and expertise become encoded into knowledge in the form of work practices, artifacts, etc. These then serve to constrain potential future behavior. Whereas in innovation, latent knowledge is combined or applied in novel ways that generate new possibilities.

The punch line is that the two modes complement each other: learning is necessary to develop the latent knowledge that precedes innovation. Luckily, the paper also explores ways that knowledge might be learned by organizations and then applied innovatively.

The obvious application to my project is that user research data is obviously present in many of the organizations I hope to study — but how to propagate those insights through organizations in such a way that they can impact decision-making? Or to put it in more concrete terms: If some people designing a web experience have important insights regarding their users with strategic implications, how does that actually translate into the decision-makers in a company making the right decision?

After exploring a couple short case studies about how IDEO and Design Continuum innovate, here are their some of their best practices:

1. Force people to work across different domains so they don’t become set in their ways.
   

   Repetitive cycles of interaction generate alignment between what people believe possible and confirmation of these beliefs in the actions (and sanctions) of others. Firms like IDEO and Design Continuum, by the variation in experiences faced by organizational members, avoid the cycle of action and experience that might rectify similar knowledge in other organizations.

2. Knowledge passes socially:
   

   The recursive processes of knowing become social when the knowledge manifested in one individual’s action, by becoming a social artifact, shapes another individual’s schema. Orr’s (1996) description of copier technicians provides a rich example of how this cycle of action and interaction create (relatively) shared understandings about possible actions (scripts), desired ends (goals), and identities. In particular, the storytelling that occurs between technicians while “, and the stories that the technicians tell circulate that knowledge” (Orr 1996, p. 5). It may appear semantic, but in this sense “shared knowledge” refers not to knowledge that is commonly held (meaning identical) across technicians but rather knowledge that has been shared between technicians—knowledge made empirical through the generation of social artifacts, in this case stories, and made latent again through each individual’s interpretation of those stories (300)

3. Isolate people from existing schemas so that they can forge their own.
   

   Other strategies for managing innovation, for example, focus less on providing a diverse set of experiences—shaping the empirical knowledge that is available—and more on directly changing the goals or identities of the participants to enable them to see new possibilities. Lockheed’s Skunkworks and Apple’s Macintosh team are famous examples of new product development teams that have been isolated from the past practices, values, and expectations of the old organization and given new and different goals and identities for acting. (300)

4. Cross-functional teams
   

   Conversely, Leonard-Barton (1995) describes a strategy of “creative abrasion,” which exploits the inherent differences based on the schemas, goals, and identities of different functional groups within an organization. This strategy generates novel actions by forcing interactions between diverse organizational members to elicit confrontation (and creative resolution) of their otherwise different perspectives on the world. Both of these strategies assume that the answers, in the form of latent knowledge, already reside to a large extent within the organization. (300)

One and three seem to be ways in which individuals within an organization can learn new things/innovate, while two and four seem more geared toward spreading those insights through an organization (not to be too simplistic or anything…). None of this is particularly earth shattering, but it’s good to have some documented cites.

Roger Martin

I did a Google Scholar and Harvard Business School search for Roger Martin’s work, and most of it doesn’t seem directly relevant to my work. His most cited stuff seems to be about the ROI on corporate responsibility, which is interesting but not too helpful. There are a couple other articles on things like how leaders think and conflicts of interest for board members.