Rethinking the Future: Rethinking Business, Principles, Competition, Control, Leadership, Markets and the World by Warren G. Bennis & Rowan Gibson

Author:Warren G. Bennis & Rowan Gibson [Bennis, Warren G. & Gibson, Rowan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Development, Forecasting, Management, Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Business Development, Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781857881080
Google: NK7n2TRBzqIC
Publisher: Nicholas Brealey Publishing
Published: 1997-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Sharing knowledge

Traditionally we’re used to hoarding things because scarcity creates value. The unwillingness to share information, for example, is highly cultural. You’ll find it most strongly in the West where we treat information and knowledge as if they were something that could be possessed. We think that people own ideas. After all, for us, what could be more personal, more ‘our own’, than our own thoughts?

In a more collectivist culture like the oriental cultures, even the concept of knowledge is different. When you or I went to school we ‘got’ knowledge. That’s our metaphorical way of looking at it, but it’s really quite inaccurate to think of knowledge in that way. What you or I get in school is something we inherit. Nobody learns history as facts, we learn history as selected facts and as stories that we tell about the facts. It’s all completely social. It’s collective. However, there is a mental model that westerners have that knowledge is something that individuals acquire and possess.

Just look at the language we use in connection with knowledge work. We talk about ‘knowledge acquisition’—something we acquire, then possess. In our consumer mindset, ‘acquire’ is tantamount to ‘purchase’. And our first instinct with something we possess is to hoard or protect it.

So I think, first, we have to help people to sort out definitions. In the West we have a very weak definition of knowledge. We use the words knowledge and information virtually synonymously, and for us there is no sharp distinction between the two.

As far as information is concerned, individuals do acquire it in a very real sense. It comes from some place and it passes from hand to hand. But knowledge, I believe, is something that is quite different. The definition we use for knowledge is ‘the capacity for effective action’. And that’s not something you ‘get’ in the sense of purchasing, it’s something you learn.

You may never persuade people to change the accepted colloquial definition of knowledge, but at the very least you can force them to think about the difference between ‘knowing about things’, which is really information, versus ‘knowing how’. That’s a pretty standard distinction in most of our western languages; the distinction between knowing about it and knowing how.

In this light, knowledge sharing and information sharing are fundamentally different. Sharing knowledge is not about giving people something, or getting something from them. That is only valid for information sharing. Sharing knowledge occurs when people are genuinely interested in helping one another develop new capacities for action; it is about creating learning processes.

Moreover, most capacities for action that are important to organizations are collective. No one could hoard them even if they tried. A football team’s knowledge, its capacity for action, is not the sum of a bunch of individuals’ knowledge. It is literally a collective phenomenon. We might say that certain individuals are ‘team players’, but that is meaningless until the team, collectively, develops the ability to play as a team. Different individuals might have relatively more

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