It seems to me that knowledge management suffers from 4-pane achromatopsia. What the hell are you talking about I hear you say! Well achromatopsia is a congenital vision disorder characterised by complete colour-blindness, central visual acuity loss, extreme light sensitivity, and rapid involuntary eye wobble. To put it another way the unfortunate individuals with achromatopsia have a limited field of vision, have great difficulty keeping focus, and wear dark glasses most of the time which further restricts their vision.

What do I mean by 4-pane? It seems to me we have a love affair with quadrant models. Just have a poke around the web and look at the various models. Beginning in the 1950’s we have Johari Windows and the Prisoner’s Dilemma models – the first designed as diagnostic to understand interpersonal communication and relationships, and the second to understand behaviour, decision-making and strategy. In the 1960’s we have Blake and Moutons’ Managerial Grid , which uses four panes to explain leadership styles. If we jump forward to the 1990’s we have Goffee and Jones’ Corporate Culture Model, where corporate culture is measured on solidarity and sociability axes. The result is a 4-pane window where corporate culture is classified as fragmented, networked, communal and mercenary.

To bring the discussion right into the knowledge management world, we must include Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi famous SECI Model – socialisation, externalisation, combination, and internalisation. And why not include Dave Snowden’s Cynefin Decision-making Framework, with its four panes – simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic? Patrick Lambe has his Knowledge Lens Framework – logos, sophos, ethos and pathos – and Matt Moore has his communication typology . Even my Knowledge Productivity Target and Stakeholder Management Target are quadrant models.

Now to be fair the Nonaka, Snowden and Lambe models are more sophisticated than a simple quadrant model. Nonaka’s model has a spiral. Snowden’s framework has a small area in the centre of his diagrams which he calls disorder, and has multiple layers. Lambe’s model is a Venn diagram overlaid onto the quadrants. Fundamentally however they are all quadrant models.

I suggest all these models with their four panes provide restrictive lens, which rather than colour our world serve to make it a world of black and whites with some shades of grey! We each have a world view, or Weltensicht, and these world views are not necessarily shared. We therefore need to understand the underlying data and assumption for each of these models or frameworks before we use them. Models are an intellectual construct in artefact form that provide an abstract, formalised, yet simplified representation of a phenomenon. It is the simplification we need to be careful with, because simplification introduces “knowledge achromatopsia”.

Do I have a solution for knowledge achromatopsia? No – not an immediate one! But a good starting point might be to liberate ourselves from our love affair with quadrant models. Another might be to make explicit our Weltensicht, and acknowledge other people’s world views are just as likely equally valid. Recognising the limitations of our models matters!

Regards Graham