Knowledge Matters™

The organisation I am working for at the moment is under considerable pressure to restructure. Now I've been through lots of restructures in the past, and few if any restructures have achieved what they were supposed to. One of the reasons for this, in my opinion, is the failure to recognise the realities of how people work.

Structure provides the skeleton an organisation requires to meet its goals and support its people, or least that is what it is supposed to do. Formal structures are planned, deliberate attempts to establish ordered relationships between the component parts of the organisation. They are supposed to:

• define tasks and job roles, thus determining the division of labour;
• establish management patterns, thereby controlling how work is planned, organised and directed; and
• determine the relationship and communication patterns between component parts of the organisation, thus limiting individual variation. ...

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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. 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! 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”. ...

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I’ve just spent the past week in Melbourne working on a $3 billion vehicle acquisition project called Project Overlander. What little free time I had I used to catch up on some reading for my doctorate. I read Professor Ronald Burt’s book “Structural Holes: the Social Structure of Competition ”, which was written in 1992. This is a seminal publication and a must read for anyone interested in network theory. When I have read his other book – “Brokerage and Closure: An Introduction to Social Capital ” – I will post some book reviews, but I digress. For me the most interesting theme was the notion of tertius gaudens.

Tertius gaudens means ‘the third who benefits’. It is a person who draws benefit from brokering relationships between others. Consider the network diagram below, which is from my doctorate. As usual I have removed all labels to preserve organisational anonymity. The nodes are shaped and coloured by business unit and sized by ‘betweenness centrality’, which is a measure that signals an actor’s potential as a go-between for other actors in the network. There is one exception – tertius gaudens. Tertius gaudens is the yellow node, and belongs to the red business unit as shown by the shape of the node.

Now this is interesting because Tertius is clearly the bridge across a major structural hole between the two business units. This gives Tertius an information advantage which is disproportionate to his position in the red business unit, and opens two distinct strategies for Tertius. ...

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On Monday night I had dinner with Patrick Lambe , David Gurteen , Mark Blackburn and Patrick Byrne . There was no purpose to the dinner other than to enjoy each others company. The conversation was wide-ranging and stimulating. We talked about subjects ranging from axiology and ethics, to science fiction writers and physicists, and even killing grounds, surfaces and gaps! It was a great night, and some of the conversation is worth recounting (as best as I can remember it).

David Gurteen told us about an abbey in England, which is surrounded by World War II pillboxes and dragon’s teeth . (Unfortunately I can’t remember the name of the abbey or the town). David was intrigued by the location of the dragon’s teeth, and initially couldn’t understand why they were where they were. From the description David provided, Patrick Byrne and I as former soldiers immediately recognised that they were obstacles designed to channel and concentrate an enemy force into a killing ground of choice. This discussion then led to talk about how military strategy can be applied to business and even knowledge management. In particular we talked about surfaces and gaps, Schwerpunkt and Auftragstaktik . ...

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Often, the greatest challenge facing an organisation is recognizing and acting on opportunity rather than solving a problem.

Peter Ginter