Corporate Training Magazine

Managing Organizational Ignorance
Vol 3 Issue 5- Sept 2007

By Mark Robbins

Developing the Right Knowledge Management Infrastructure
An ambiguous problem is one for which a customer's requirements do not make immediate sense or are not understood, often because it is so novel. With no similar experience, a company has no framework to define and evaluate the customer's needs. Discussion among senior management and experts from various departments are often necessary to come to some agreement about how to define and approach the problem. The customer and stakeholder groups may also need to be included in a collaborative process of defining needs and capabilities.

Equivocality emerges as various interpretations and approaches are developed. At this point, decision-makers and stakeholders need to converge on one interpretation. If this isn't possible, then a small number of competing approaches might be developed. As more information and knowledge are gathered, proposals are dropped until one survives.

The factors of a complex problem are well-known and specifiable with relative certainty, but numerous and intricately related. Tracking and electronic communication systems such as email and electronic discussion forums play an important role in coordination. Expert systems and decision support systems may help apply expertise to routine and codifiable problems that are too complex for less experienced analysts.

An uncertain problem is one where the factors are well-known but their particular values are not specifiable with high certainty, usually because the firm lacks sufficient historical information. To counter this, companies may choose to expand their search in an attempt to locate sources of additional information.

Knowledge Problems Pervade the Organization
One of the greatest challenges organizations face lies in the interpretation and analysis in the course of their day-to-day operations. They must be open to novel and apparently inexplicable events, and their ongoing goal should be to continually convert novel events that require special processing into routine events by systematically learning more about them.

They may also encounter the four knowledge problems in working with the feedback they use to measure performance. Internal feedback traditionally has been provided by financial variance and resource utilization reports. It may also include non-financial measures such as new product development metrics or employee satisfaction. External feedback may include customer satisfaction regarding service and quality, warranty performance or industry benchmarking.

Regardless of the feedback used, it can be complex (as is often the case with incentive and reward systems) or unpredictable in how it varies. It may also be ambiguous or equivocal if it doesn't appear to make sense. Each problem represents a potential source of ignorance regarding the organization's knowledge about itself. Only after these control-oriented knowledge problems are acknowledged, identified and acted on will the organization know enough to use its performance feedback to bring its operations back into control.

Executives similarly use the information and knowledge of the organization's control systems to formulate strategy and to determine whether its competitive opportunities and organizational capabilities and resources are appropriate and in balance. Those strategic decisions and actions, in turn, determine what the operations to be controlled will look like. Even though a control system might give clear, unambiguous indications that an organization is not in control, the reasoning behind those indications may be ambiguous, reflecting a lack of strategic knowledge about how the organization's capabilities match its competitive environment.

The four knowledge-problems framework provides a powerful lens for viewing information processing, communication, and knowledge management in organizations. It suggests several prescriptions and conclusions.

1. Knowledge management today focuses primarily on solving problems of complexity and uncertainty. It aims to share and exploit what is known within well-defined circumstances and contexts. Much less effort has been spent focusing on the ambiguous and equivocal situations resulting from more profound forms of organizational ignorance. To truly manage knowledge and expertise, organizations must ensure that their members work toward building a shared fundamental understanding of the situations and problems they face.

2. Organizations must be open to novelty and anomaly. Only by acknowledging its ignorance can an organization put itself on the road to learning. Organizations must recognize and accept that there are events that may be difficult to explain because no one understands them well enough.

3. Even the non-routine or unpredictable aspects of the four problems can be managed‹or at least anticipated‹in a routine fashion. Where ambiguity or equivocality routinely arise, organizations should create standing mechanisms to address them. Provisions must be made for face-to-face conversations to occur among those most relevant to resolving ambiguity or equivocality. Those responsible for executing the resulting interpretations must also be involved so that those interpretations can be meaningfully communicated. Uncertainty can be routinely handled by anticipatory mechanisms for exchanging information. Complexity can be handled by anticipatory mechanisms for locating knowledge.

4. Organizations need to go beyond their own boundaries to find the knowledge they need to help them make sense of the world. Where the organization is relatively ignorant about a market or technology, it should include the customer or vendor in the sense-making process. In doing so, the organization will also develop a shared understanding and basis for ongoing communication with its customers and trading partners. As ambiguity and equivocality give way to uncertainty and complexity, the organization can more easily migrate to more structured technologies to communicate and coordinate with its external partners.

5. It's not enough for senior executives and managers to merely catalog organizational knowledge by creating a 'knowledge map'. Rather, they must sense the organization's knowledge and ignorance by engaging all organizational levels in the process of resolving the four knowledge problems.

6. Like managing knowledge, managing organizational ignorance requires an appropriate culture. In general, the organization must create an environment in which it's acceptable to publicly admit that you don't know something. Multinational organizations may find this to be particularly problematic in certain national cultures.

Managing complexity requires a culture in which it's acceptable to identify and support experts and seek their advice. Resolving uncertainty requires a culture supportive of open, clear and extensive cross-boundary communication, and a willingness and ability to bridge various languages (both professional and national) in use across the organization. Resolving ambiguity requires the ability to confess ignorance and confusion. Managing equivocality requires an environment in which it is acceptable to disagree about interpretations and which accepts diversity of views as well as useful and productive consensus.

7. And finally, each of the four knowledge problems suggests a different set of processes, roles, information technologies and organizational structures for their resolution. In organizations where those problems can be segmented, it may be possible to create separate organizational units for their resolution. Often, however, those problems are intertwined. In those cases, the organization must be flexible enough to modify itself dynamically to deal with the knowledge problem at hand.

The four problems suggest a framework for managing organizational learning. While ambiguous and equivocal problems often represent non-routine events about which the organization lacks sufficient knowledge, the process of resolving ambiguity and equivocality is the stuff of which organizational learning is made.

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