Steered by an effective governance strategy, knowledge dynamics within a firm can be developed into a valuable competitive capability. Organisational literature to-date has largely failed to set out clearly and holistically how such a knowledge governance strategy should be designed in practice Based on ten principles distilled from literature and practice, this paper aims to present the foundation on which an integrated approach could be developed to meet the specific needs of knowledge-intensive firms.

1.      Introducing Knowledge Dynamics

Management involves continually fine-tuning the dynamic capabilities of the firm to successfully compete in its chosen market. This includes the continual adjustment of focus and competencies, and maximising the utility of all corporate resources in line with the firm’s key performance objectives. Competencies may be enhanced incrementally (e.g. through continuous process improvement) as well as radically. Managers usually spend much of their effort addressing the ‘hard’ or tangible performance elements, ones that can be directly monitored and/or easily measured. Internal examples of such elements include the throughput of key business processes, work organisation, worker productivity, product quality, workflow and infrastructure, while external examples include managing the supply chain and contractual obligations with suppliers, distributors and clients. All of this needs additionally to be underpinned by the effective custodianship of what are traditionally called the ‘soft’ or intangible performance elements, such as staff motivation, corporate culture, external relationships and, the focus of this paper, corporate knowledge.

Steered by an effective governance strategy, knowledge dynamics, the velocity of knowledge creation and sharing within the firm, can often be developed into a valuable competitive capability, and is considered fundamental to the survival of most knowledge-intensive organisations. Such a knowledge governance strategy needs to encompass both managing explicit knowledge^{1 2}, which is codified and embedded in products, processes and artefacts, such as documents or patents, and influencing tacit knowledge, the uncodified, professional and individual knowledge held by workers^{3 4}. The latter is frequently the most powerful source of competitive advantage and the foundation of a firm’s creativity, innovation and its rapid responsiveness to market opportunities.

Companies classically address explicit knowledge needs through communication and staff education initiatives such as training courses. Such programmes do not usually adequately address the tacit knowledge needs of workers. Individual knowledge workers themselves develop highly personalised know-how in order to succeed in performing complex roles and also help them adapt quickly to the changing needs of the firm. Yet this valuable tacit knowledge is often invisible to management and not something that is (or indeed could be) empirically measured or directly managed.

One of the academic debates over the last decade considered “whether it is knowledge per se or rather knowledge management, which is at the source of a firm’s competitive advantage”⁵. It is argued that the competitive value of knowledge needs to be defined as not only as the stock of knowledge held in corporate artefacts or accumulated by individuals within it, but rather a function of this and the “velocity at which such knowledge is shared throughout the organization”⁶. I consider this ‘velocity’, the speed and effectiveness of creating and sharing knowledge within the firm, and its antecedents and underlying processes, as dimensions of knowledge dynamics, which focuses not merely on the cognitive potential (the static perspective), but also the velocity and density of actual knowledge transactions within an organisation (the kinetic perspective).

This article discusses some of the key factors that influence knowledge dynamics within the context of effective management of organisations, and from these distils ten practical principles that should help to shape the foundation of an effective knowledge governance strategy. When flexed⁷ to the needs and priorities of a specific company and sensibly implemented, such a strategy should positively influence knowledge dynamics. My proposed approach ontologically supports the notion of the holistic nature of knowledge⁷, and therefore it aims harmoniously to influence both its explicit and tacit dimensions.

The propositions presented in this paper should be accepted as a modest first-pass attempt to normatively synthesise current academic and practical insights, and provide the basis for the collaborative evolution of best practice.

2.      Adopting a Position on the Nature of Knowledge

Explicit knowledge resources are by definition tangible, whether or not their value is directly reflected in corporate accounts as intellectual property assets. Tacit knowledge resources are, again by definition, not tangible and cannot directly feature on a balance sheet. Yet this personal and specialised professional knowledge, which individual workers nurture to succeed in performing complex roles, has long been recognised as a significant corporate resource^{8 9} and a driver of competitive advantage¹⁰, particularly in innovation-intensive firms. The effective sharing of tacit knowledge, which is inherently rich and adaptable, catalyses team innovation and the collaborative development of new skills and best practice, enabling knowledge workers to deal more confidently with the complexity and unpredictability of their environment. Exchanging war stories in product development of how technical problems were solved or seemingly impossible deadlines were met, for example, is a classic way in which teams of knowledge workers hone their professional aptitudes, as well as reinforce mutual relationships and build trust. Additionally, opportunities for continuously enhancing tacit knowledge “are prime factors in attracting and maintaining a talented and productive workforce”¹¹. It is in the interest of management to ensure that appropriate contexts are in place for such interactions rich in tacit knowledge to occur.

Within the context of knowledge dynamics, tacit knowledge does not exist independently, and it is essentially inseparable from explicit knowledge. For nearly three decades, the prevailing treatment of knowledge within organisational discourse was rooted in Polanyi’s¹² continuum paradigm. This presented codifiable and objective ‘knowing what’-knowledge at one end and uncodifiable and subjective ‘knowing how’-knowledge at the other. Once these categories became firmly adopted in literature as the explicit and tacit dimensions of knowledge respectively, what had been steadily constructed by scholars on Polanyi’s original epistemological foundation was an expanding taxonomy of knowledge¹³ largely expressed in continua and dualisms, which typically deconstructed knowledge into increasingly esoteric elements to support specific academic agendas.

This process has produced several subtly different knowledge dichotomies such as Eck’s¹⁴ ‘post-figurative, configurative and pre-figurative knowledge’, Orlikowski’s¹⁵ ‘local-universal’, ‘codified-uncodified’, ‘canonical-noncanonical’ and ‘procedural-declarative’, as well as examples of further deconstruction of the widely adopted explicit and tacit categories into increasingly complex subcategories. For example, tacit knowledge at a more granular level has been subcategorised into cognitive and technical domains, defined as established mental models and acquired task know-how respectively^{16 17 18}, or alternatively into nonepistle, sociocultural, semantic, and sagacious subcategories¹⁹.

It is not the objective of this paper to further this epistemological debate or comment on any specific taxonomies. For a knowledge governance strategy to be effective, thankfully it is sufficient and advisable to treat knowledge holistically, accepting that the fundamental nature of knowledge is that tacit and explicit knowledge are mutually constituted²⁰. This theoretical position actually revisits Polanyi’s²¹ original proposition that tacit knowledge is an integral part of an individual’s total knowing. As workplace case studies have shown²², professional knowledge is never fully explicit nor fully tacit, but a dynamic interplay of the two. Workers themselves cannot in practice apportion their mental processes between these two domains²³. This is why my first proposition is that a management strategy aimed to influence organisational knowledge dynamics needs to holistically and harmoniously address both dimensions^{24 25}, especially that it is tacit knowledge that shapes the sensemaking which allows workers to absorb and interpret the explicit knowledge available to them²⁶.

Proposition 1: A knowledge governance strategy needs to take into account the holistic and mutually constituted nature of knowledge, and employ an integrated approach which influences both its explicit and tacit dynamic dimensions.

It is not helpful that case studies in literature tend to focus either on examples of improving the management of explicit knowledge or the tacit, with few convincing examples of action research tackling both in an integrated way. One exception, very relevant to this paper in terms of empirical evidence, but also with the added value of discussing performance outcomes, is Haas & Hansen’s²⁷ study of sales teams in a management consulting company, which considered both simultaneously and compared their relative contributions to task performance.

3.      Knowledge as a Dynamic Capability of the Firm

A level of abstraction above the deconstructionist and taxonomic debate above, knowledge has been presented as perhaps the most valuable corporate resource²⁸, and to underline this, some scholars have even paradigmatically adopted a perspective of the firm that views it primarily as a knowledge-creating entity^{29 30}. Knowledge has significant direct financial value³¹, and is fundamental to developing a sustainable competitive advantage^{32 33 34}. Within the context of this value argument, it may be useful to further distinguish the need for companies to continuously develop general purpose knowledge, which while not unique allows the firm to offer a competitive market proposition by remaining state-of-the art within its industry across its broad market offering, and firm-specific idiosyncratic knowledge which differentiates the company and allows it to overtake its competitors in specific areas³⁵. While the former guards against competitive disadvantage, the latter can be source of sustainable competitive advantage, particularly if the idiosyncrasy is deeply situated within its unique firm-specific context, thus making it imperfectly imitable in nature^{36 37}

Proposition 2: The strategy should ensure that general purpose knowledge is continually updated to prevent competitive disadvantage, as well as promote specialist and idiosyncratic knowledge in areas where the firm can develop a unique offering.

Despite its increasingly elevated status in management literature, the exact definition of organisational knowledge, let alone that of the discipline of knowledge management, remains elusive. These concepts are often confused with information and information management respectively. However, even the briefest epistemological scrutiny reveals the insight that information and knowledge are not synonymous^{38 39 40 41}. Specifically, the former is objective and actor independent, while the latter is subjective, and actor bound. Information, in whatever format or medium of communication, remains a neutral collection of data⁴². In contrast, knowledge is an individual’s faculty of knowing or understanding something⁴³, and their capacity to exercise judgment and draw distinctions⁴⁴. Information may be translated into knowledge by the process of assimilating and reconciling it with existing knowledge held by an individual. New information therefore enriches, or in some cases makes redundant, existing knowledge, and in this context can be characterised as being merely the potential source of knowledge.

As an extension of the epistemological confusion in some organisational literature between the terms knowledge and information, the treatment of the management of these is also blurred. As critically highlighted by several academics^{45 46}, literature often approaches the concept of knowledge management as in effect an information technology issue. According to Easterby-Smith et al⁴⁷ “approximately ⁷⁰ per cent of publications on knowledge management so far have been written by information technology specialists who focus on the technical aspects such as database design and knowledge warehousing”. Blosch⁴⁸ rightly summarises that fundamentally it is people who can have knowledge and not information systems, but similarly observes that “much of the literature of ‘knowledge management’ is almost identical in theme and content to that of ‘information management’”.

Proposition 3: While information systems can have a significant role in supporting and enabling some knowledge processes, knowledge governance is not an IT issue, it is primarily a people issue.

Many leading academic articles in this area^{49 50} concentrate on an organisational (macro), rather than individual (micro) level of granularity. The dominance of this collective locus of knowledge⁵¹ has been empirically confirmed by Foss et al⁵². Whether such focus on the collective versus individual is justified or not is not an issue for this paper, which in line with its normative aspirations has already declared a holistic bias. I propose that all organisational levels, from the individual to the firm as a whole, as well as the interplay between these, need to be illuminated in practice to gain a meaningful insight into knowledge dynamics and its relationship to organisational outcomes. Choosing exclusively a single level of organisational granularity only allows a single level of abstraction, and hides the vertical (or, more accurately, network) relationships between the levels. In contrast, a multilevel approach allows us to evaluate these relationships and equip us with the understanding necessary to answer questions such as ‘is knowledge creation contingent more on the organisational process or on the attributes of the individual concerned?’. Especially relevant to this paper, moreover, is that at the relatively neglected micro-level, outside of the communities of practice discourse⁵³ little understanding exists of how physically dispersed members of an organisation, each working within different cognitive, social and working environment contexts, share knowledge and learn from each other^{54 55}, and how this then aggregates to an organisational outcome. Yet such organisational arrangements are common in many leading knowledge-intensive firms, most notably within the research and service industries.

I share Foss’s⁵⁶ ontological critique of the methodological collectivism behind any claim that one set of aggregates (the firm’s capabilities) drive another set of aggregates (competitive advantage). This obscures far too many micro-level interactions and correlations to be meaningful. In this particular context, “what is obscured is the issue of how knowledge that ultimately resides on the level of the individuals is somehow integrated through organizational means into organization-level capability, and how this integration results in knowledge being utilized in such a manner that competitive advantage becomes the result”⁵⁷. In short, much literature presents theoretical houses of cards that are without solid micro-foundations.

Proposition 4: A knowledge governance strategy needs to influence all levels of the firm – individuals, teams and organisational units, as well as informal networks within the firm – as all of these are interrelated and collectively deliver firm-level knowledge outcomes.

To distance myself from the largely tolerated technology-biased and organisation-level bias of knowledge management⁵⁸ as discussed above, I have adopted the relatively new multi-disciplinary concept of knowledge governance⁵⁹. This inter alia employs a transaction cost economics lens to focus on how the organisational micro-foundations need to be managed to reduce the cost of and increase the benefits from knowledge dynamics. It has been loosely defined as “choosing organizational structures and mechanisms that can influence the processes of using, sharing, integrating, and creating knowledge in preferred directions and towards preferred levels”⁶⁰. This introduces another area of intense theoretical debate, namely evaluating the contribution of knowledge to organisational performance.

4.      Alignment to Performance and Value

Knowledge transactions are not cost free^{61 62 63 64}. Knowledge creation and sharing are an investment by the actors involved. Searching and acquiring knowledge similarly require often considerable time and effort. Internal barriers, both perceived and real, hinder knowledge dynamics at all levels within the firm. As Haas & Hansen⁶⁵ argue, such costs can outweigh the benefits of knowledge transactions and not necessarily improve the task performance within the firm and, by extension, the firm’s overall performance.

There is a shortage of convincing evidence in management literature of proven, empirical correlations between investments in knowledge dynamics and the resultant productivity benefits of workers and teams, outside of narrow contexts such as specific processes like product innovation^{66 67}. Documented examples of step change improvements to the overall competitiveness of knowledge-intensive firms, which were convincingly the result of knowledge governance initiatives, are conspicuous by their absence.

Thus, while positively influencing improvements to organisational learning generally and intraorganisational knowledge dynamics specifically is commonly regarded as a self-evidently worthy objective⁶⁸, and the theoretical link to corporate dynamic capability is often encountered in organisational literature, there are no broadly established benchmarks to support evidence-based forecasts of the likely productivity or quality benefits from investment in knowledge governance.

To further complicate matters, there are also theoretical as well as empirical examples of negative correlations between knowledge dynamics and performance, which management should also be sensitive to. While accepting that this area is currently a promising candidate for future research, van Wijk et al⁶⁹ for example warn that “too much knowledge transfer might be detrimental to performance”. A key concern is the organisational utility of the knowledge concerned, that is whether it promotes worker behaviour or actions that are supportive of the organisation’s best interests. Unhelpfully in academic treatment, knowledge and learning usually have an implicit positive value, in that “just like culture or intellectual or social capital, they are implicitly assumed to create value and to support corporate objectives”⁷⁰.

The notion that knowledge is something self-evidently positive, in that the more knowledge a worker possesses, the ‘better’, is difficult to justify on two counts. Firstly, and philosophically, it can be asserted that knowledge “is not necessarily functional, useful, and a generally good thing”⁷¹. As any other resource, its utility is directly proportional to its contribution within a domain of action^{72 73 74}. In other words, workers’ knowledge is only ‘positive’ if it helps them successfully to perform their roles in line with the needs of the organisation⁷⁵ and successfully adapt to the firm’s changing needs and priorities. Secondly, there are specific examples where workers “correctly learn that which is incorrect”⁷⁶, and their subsequent superficially positive knowledge actually damage their effectiveness and performance. This includes the continuation of poor improvisations based on sub-optimal heuristic knowledge. 

Some tacit knowledge even when initially positive from the firm’s perspective, can in time become a strong constraint to change^{77 78}, limiting competitive flexibility and responsiveness. “Knowledge results from, and reinforces, specific mindsets”⁷⁹. While explicit knowledge, such as company guidelines or product specifications, can be updated visibly and unambiguously by management when needed, the process of updating tacit knowledge, and especially the mental models that workers base their behaviour and judgements on, is more complex and much less predictable, visible and controllable. Sanchez⁸⁰ similarly discusses the negative aspect of cognitive congruence, where individuals within a group over time converge to a common tacit knowledge domain of “beliefs, self-concepts and scripts”, which then naturally resists change and can lead to cognitive stasis in work groups, and in extreme cases to boycotts, contra-productive opposition and turf wars⁸¹.

Returning to positive aspects, as would be expected since this topic has been fashionable both in practice and academic literature for the last twenty years or so, at a theoretical level most senior management teams are already sensitive to the importance of knowledge⁸², especially as a theoretical source of the firm’s sustainable competitive advantage and productivity benefits, through for example the efficient re-use of knowledge within the company. However, given the lack of proven empirical correlations and industry benchmarks, these managers unsurprisingly usually struggle to develop robust business cases for investment in knowledge governance, which require that realistic costs and benefits are quantified and justified. In my practical industry experience, such investments by firms often become ‘leaps of faith’. As academia has so far failed to deliver a convincing theoretical foundation, this is not a criticism of management. To minimise investment risk, I usually advise companies to establish some specific investment performance indicators to demonstrate that appropriate improvements are being realised. These performance indicators need to be aligned with the corporate strategy and priorities, and investment should be incremental and contingent on visible improvements of these indicators.

Proposition 5: In practice, investment in knowledge governance improvements is unlikely to be justifiable ex ante by a robust business case. Instead, an incremental investment programme should be considered, supported by appropriate and continually monitored investment performance indicators.

For example, turnover of expert resources is sometimes a particular issue for a company. Improvements in knowledge dynamics are positively correlated to reducing staff attrition of key knowledge workers. Not only do such investments send a powerful political message that the company values the expertise of its workers, stimulating the collaborative development of idiosyncratic knowledge further differentiates the company both internally and externally and acts as organisational ‘glue’⁸³ that brings workers closer together, strengthening ties between workers⁸⁴ and mutual trust⁸⁵. These effects not only catalyse knowledge dynamics, but also increase exit cost for staff. Thus, expert staff turnover could be one of the meaningful investment performance indicators for those firms which recognise this as a priority issue.

Unfortunately, this investment evaluation approach needs to be appropriately caveated. Even within such narrow a focus, knowledge dynamics is only one of the many influencing factors. In this example, staff attrition is clearly contingent on many other factors such as management style, company performance, reward mechanisms, prospects of promotion, individual role definitions, goals and objectives, as well as external causes such as market and competitor developments. In evaluating the contribution of any investment in knowledge governance, management would need to distil the relevant contribution of knowledge dynamics from such background noise.

Any analysis of performance impacts should also be sensitive to the differential contribution of some elements of knowledge dynamics, as illustrated by Haas and Hansen’s⁸⁶ study. Their specific contribution is that “sharing codified knowledge in the form of electronic documents saved time during the task, but did not improve work quality or signal competence to clients. In contrast, sharing personal advice improved work quality and signalled competence, but did not save time”. They conclude that “the main finding of this study is that different types of knowledge affect task performance differently”. This conclusion and their specific example again underline the importance of acquiring an insight into what is happening at the micro-foundation level and then tracing this through to an understanding of how these elements contribute to firm level outcomes.

5.      Social and Situational Determinants

An organisation is primarily a social construct, sometimes summarised as a negotiated order⁸⁷ or, in simpler terms, as a community⁸⁸. Sharing this perspective, which is supported by many personal insights in operational practice, I am naturally biased towards a social constructionist paradigm which sees knowledge creation and sharing within a bounded organisational context as being driven primarily by social and situational determinants and playing a role in a working community^{89 90 91 92 93}. This perspective sees knowledge transactions or learning as situated in practice^{94 95 96}. This is particularly true of tacit knowledge, which cannot be shared impersonally, for example in the form of an artefact. While it must be reiterated that tacit knowledge is by definition personal and acquired through first-hand experience and action⁹⁷, as Merali⁹⁸ observes, most transformations in knowledge “happen through the social interactions in which individuals communicate, share activities, and exchange ideas”. Designing a knowledge governance strategy needs therefore to reflect the social dimension of this knowledge and focus on aligned processes, such as social interaction and shared practice.

Having already declared allegiance to the notion of the holistic and mutually constituted nature of knowledge, I now propose that unfortunately organisational literature provides little clear normative advice of how this holism should effectively be governed, especially taking into account the social dimension. Classic schemas that attempt to show knowledge holistically as an interplay between tacit and explicit⁹⁹ typically invoke processes such as socialisation (from tacit to tacit), externalisation (from tacit to explicit), internalisation (from explicit to tacit) and combination (from explicit to explicit). Such a model may be a helpful abstraction in theory building, but to be really useful as a management tool, the vectors need to reflect the magnitudes of knowledge velocity¹⁰⁰, which in turn depend on many local factors. These include knowledge stickiness which constrains its transmission¹⁰¹, the inability of the human mind to fully and accurately remember retained information¹⁰², inherent impossibility to fully articulate tacit knowledge^{103 104}, limited absorptive capacity of actors¹⁰⁵, the situated and context-specific nature of knowledge^{106 107}, and that at the core of any sensemaking are the necessarily polluting processes of reduction and extrapolation¹⁰⁸. In summary, there is a lot more going on at the micro-foundation level than such schemas allow for.

Fundamentally, though, classical schemas of knowledge dynamics usually do not address the sociocognitive perspective that “individuals are not just passive perceivers of their environment”¹⁰⁹, but actively construct their own meaning from information being received^{110 111}, and this in turn depends on the sender, the receiver, and the social context. Paul Hendriks¹¹² observes that “in a strict sense, knowledge cannot be shared. Knowledge is not like a commodity that can be passed around freely, it is tied to a knowing subject. To learn something from someone else, i.e. to share his or her knowledge, an act of reconstruction is needed”. Because of different cognitive and heuristic biases¹¹³, sensemaking by two individuals even when sharing exactly the same experience will produce differences in their resultant knowledge^{114 115}.

To share any knowledge, the knowledge giver must first externalise it. This can be done through one or several methods such as direct mentoring, explicit codification, observable action, metaphors or storytelling. The knowledge receiver then needs to internalise this knowledge¹¹⁶. This involves the integration of the newly acquired knowledge with that already absorbed¹¹⁷ and potentially resolving any conflicts and ambiguities between these two sets. These processes, as well as the actual act of transferring the knowledge between giver and receiver, inevitably modify (‘pollute’) the unit of knowledge being shared. Thus, I would agree with Hendriks¹¹⁸ that in reality we do not share knowledge per se, in the sense that a unit of knowledge cannot be passed to another person in an unmodified form, but rather allow the receiver to take an imperfect and personalized impression of the giver’s knowledge. The more complex the knowledge, or the more it conflicts with the receiver’s existing knowledge, the more cognitive negotiation is likely to occur between the giver and receiver.

Knowledge governance strategies that major on corporate education programmes do demonstrably enhance the explicit knowledge of workers, and can be effective partly because objective information is less pollutable. This is a useful approach for cascading new work instructions, procedures, scripts, product specifications, business rules, indeed anything that can be relatively easily codified and articulated. Workers could even be tested afterwards to demonstrate their accurate retention of this knowledge. Though largely dependent on the aptitude of the trainers and the methods employed, such collective programmes are not usually effective at enhancing the tacit knowledge of workers, not least because of the limited opportunities for personal cognitive negotiation between the knowledge giver and receiver and for tailoring the giver’s externalisation technique to the individual receiver. Moreover, as the discussion above illustrates, the process of individual sensemaking moderates both the accurate conveyance of tacit knowledge and the ability to unambiguously test its retention ex post.

Proposition 6: While explicit knowledge dynamics can be tackled through collective programmes, by its nature tacit knowledge needs to be tackled on a personal and individual basis, with an approach which is sensitive to the social and situational context.

The conceptual contrast between collective and individual knowledge distribution has intensively been covered in literature, most frequently in the guise of the decades-long debate of single-loop versus double-loop learning¹¹⁹. As Beesley & Cooper¹²⁰ usefully summarise, “one-way communication, at best, will result in adjustment of existing knowledge structures, and receptivity is limited by the strength of the intent to learn (...) and the subjective interpretation of the receiver”. In contrast, they argue, “double-loop learning (via practical exercises in workshop forums, for example) facilitates mutual understanding as shared communications serve to develop an appreciation of the Other’s world-view and thought processes and then build and broaden their own. Knowledge acquisition then is not an ‘‘all or none’’ state. Elements of the incoming information may be acquired, while others may not. Double-loop learning, or two-way communications maximise the extent to which knowledge is acquired and the integrity of that which is transferred.”

6.      Rich Communication and Trust

As I outline above, there is a number of factors that constrain the velocity of intraorganisational knowledge and which management should understand when formulating a knowledge governance strategy. Szulanski¹²¹ and others popularised the concept of knowledge stickiness, a quality which impairs knowledge dynamics within an organisation. Von Hippel¹²² defines the “stickiness of a given unit of information in a given instance as the incremental expenditure required to transfer that unit of information to a specified locus in a form usable by a given information seeker”, and in contrast to some scholars who attach an almost exclusive emphasis on the attributes of the knowledge itself¹²³, notes that this definition “involves not only attributes of the information itself, but attributes of and choices made by information seekers and information providers”. Significant influence is attached to both the relationship (tie) strength¹²⁴ and the degree of trust between these actors. Both qualities also directly influence the perceived trustworthiness of the knowledge transaction¹²⁵, and the actors’ readiness to share knowledge in the first place¹²⁶.

Building on their meta-analytical study of the antecedents and consequences of organisational knowledge dynamics, van Wijk et al¹²⁷ conclude that “firms seeking to change the extent of knowledge transfer need to focus particularly on developing strong and trustworthy relations, especially within organizational boundaries”.

Proposition 7: Knowledge dynamics is greatly catalysed through the fostering of stronger intracompany relationships and mutual trust.

For companies considering adopting the tie strength of their knowledge workers as a knowledge governance investment performance indicator (see Proposition 5 above), another caveat is due. This is one of many examples of a possible proxy metric which, while potentially accurately indicating the status of the antecedents of effective knowledge dynamics, do not directly measure knowledge dynamics per se. Such proxy metrics, while useful, need to be considered with care. In this example, as Beesley & Cooper¹²⁸ observe, “social relationships within themselves are a necessary, but insufficient condition for knowledge transfer to take place. Social relationships act as conduits for knowledge transfer to take place, but it is the depth of understanding that transpires through two-way communications among individuals that leads to knowledge transfer.”

Before moving on, having briefly revisited Proposition 5, it is also interesting to note that van Wijk et al’s¹²⁹ study cited above, while strongly corroborating the largely theoretical yet commonly-adopted hypothesis of a positive correlation between knowledge dynamics and organisational performance, does not attempt to extend this to any predictive model, i.e. an approach for estimating performance outcomes for a given investment in improving knowledge dynamics, or even a quantitative benchmark. As the authors themselves note, “although conceptual and qualitative reviews of the literature on organizational knowledge transfer have been done (...), no study has attempted to summarize the quantitative findings present in the large body of empirical research”. This supports my advice to invest carefully and incrementally.

Having underlined the importance of relationship strength and trust between actors, I now turn to characteristics of the actual communication process between them, as knowledge transaction are primarily communication processes¹³⁰. Several scholars cite language as a critical element in any knowledge transaction. To adopt the post-modernist view, it can be argued that knowledge and language are interchangeable in that “knowledge is constructed in and through language”¹³¹ and does not have a tangible existence outside of sociolinguistic processes. If knowledge is transmitted linguistically (by the spoken or written word), “numerous alterations can and normally do happen”¹³², and the degree of its ‘pollution’ (a concept I already touched on above) depends on the fidelity of the language to the concepts being transmitted. As Tsoukas & Vladimirou¹³³ argue, “when our language is crude and unsophisticated, so are our distinctions and the consequent judgments. The more refined our language, the finer our distinctions”. The spoken word has an inherently reductive propensity¹³⁴. To make language more capable of transmitting abstract knowledge, such as complex ideas and experience, with greater fidelity and granularity of detail, metaphors and storytelling are often successfully employed in the workplace^{135 136 137 138}.

Storytelling is a significant element of organisational socialisation and helps to reinforce relationships and trust in the workplace. Its contribution to this and knowledge dynamics has frequently been discussed as a discrete phenomenon in literature¹³⁹. Stories and anecdotes are particularly important to workers in tacit knowledge intensive (and therefore ambiguous) contexts as a method of continuously challenging and reinforcing perceptions of sequentiality (“X happened, which triggered Y”) and causality (“Y happened because I did X”) of actions. While individual incidents may not be replicable or even directly relevant to other workers, over time, storytelling builds up patterns and cognitive models that help workers better navigate the “bounded rationality”¹⁴⁰ of their work environment. Storytelling and the use of metaphors are particularly rich in heuristic knowledge¹⁴¹ and normative information, can help express what is not easily articulable¹⁴², act as useful abbreviations¹⁴³, and are especially effective in fostering intersubjectivity in social networks such as communities of practice¹⁴⁴.

Proposition 8: Positive and valid metaphors and storytelling should be employed in a structured way to enrich knowledge transactions, and reinforce relationships and trust.

In the above proposition, I have carefully used the term ‘positive and valid’ in order to underline the need to ensure that these techniques are aligned with the organisational strategy and priorities. Thus workplace metaphors and stories need to be continually updated to ensure their currency and utility. There is an inherent risk of specific messages outliving their positive contribution “because stories are more vivid, engaging, entertaining, and easily related to personal experience than rules or directives”¹⁴⁵. Sometimes the organisation changes and stories which are no longer applicable still persist. Empirical data unfortunately also suggests that there tends to be a bias towards negative stories¹⁴⁶. This resonates with my earlier assertion that knowledge is not always self-evidently positive. A working environment rich in metaphor and story based tacit knowledge transactions could actually be inherently counterproductive to individuals within it and the firm as a whole.

7.      Adopting an Appropriate Culture and Management Style

In most knowledge-intensive organisations, key workers perform complex roles and have a relatively broad locus of discretion. Such workers are often team leaders, product designers, engineers, consultants, or experts in marketing or research & development. They perform roles that are typically unpredictable in process and/or with an unpredictable outcome^{147 148 149 150} and are often under the full control and autonomy of the actor¹⁵¹. It is critical that any knowledge governance strategy should reflect this relative autonomy and strive to engage positively with these workers, so rather than feeling that their locus of discretion is coming under increasing threat, they should become supporters and ideally champions of the strategy.

Strategies which rely on a principally dictatorial approach to such workers are likely to fail and instead result in undesired consequences such as increased key staff turnover. Literature generally agrees that the nature of knowledge-intensive work intrinsically conflicts with a hierarchical and coercive approach to management. “Knowledge organizations require skills derived from freethinking and unbounded actions of those working for them”¹⁵², or as Joseph Weiss¹⁵³ similarly observes, “the information-based organization has knowledge workers who are specialists (or players) and who resist command-and-control procedures based on the military model”. Davenport et al¹⁵⁴ agree: “knowledge workers are likely to resist standard routines; in fact, the level of discretion and autonomy often separates knowledge workers from administrative workers”. “Each doer has a unique way of accomplishing knowledge work” and requires control over the environment within which this work is situated¹⁵⁵.

According to Alvesson & Sveningsson¹⁵⁶, “managers must allow much space for knowledge workers, partly because managers know less of what goes on than those large groups of employees holding esoteric expertise, partly because professional norms and occupational cultures make such employees less inclined to subordinate themselves to managerial hierarchies”. This resonates with the prevalent notion that whatever the corporate knowledge governance priorities may be, workers in knowledge-intensive roles need to remain largely autonomous and self-managing^{157 158}. As Blosch¹⁵⁹ concludes, “the knowledge-based organization focuses on allowing individuals to learn, experiment and communicate with each other in an atmosphere that is open to change”.

Proposition 9: Knowledge governance needs to be supported by an appropriate management style which fosters a corporate culture which promotes innovation, individual judgement and self-management in its knowledge workers.

Management should therefore focus on embedding suitable environmental enablers that naturally catalyse knowledge dynamics, and I present examples of such enablers in this paper. As managers are constrained from imposing directives and driving the underlying micro-processes directly, the knowledge governance strategy ideally needs to be credibly owned and driven by the workers concerned, and not imposed top-down by management. Within a supportive organisational environment, workers themselves can usually quickly position themselves to tackle new challenges and self-adapt to changing conditions and priorities without much interference from management. Providing the strategy and priorities of the firm are communicated continuously, clearly and convincingly to these workers, they can flex their roles accordingly. Where the need for management interference is accepted, because of the uniqueness of each knowledge worker, their role and their work content, the management approach needs similarly to be unique and tailored to that individual and their situation¹⁶⁰.

Delegated ownership of the knowledge governance strategy, however, does not remove the need for visible leadership by top management. In addition to promoting the culture and values supportive of knowledge dynamics, management need to steer and communicate knowledge governance priorities so that these remain continuously aligned with the company’s situation and strategy. The choice of leadership style is very important as this not only directly shapes the firm’s culture, but also needs to be sensitive to the sensitivities and demands of knowledge workers as discussed above. Inappropriate leadership could easily introduce worker resistance and resentment. Proposition 9 suggests that transformational leadership more naturally meets the cultural expectations of knowledge workers as this emphasises “experimentation, risk taking, punctuated change, and multiple alternatives”¹⁶¹, although there are likely to be specific situations where elements of knowledge governance will need to be steered with a more transactional leadership style.

Proposition 10: A knowledge governance strategy needs to be visibly owned and driven by the workers themselves and not imposed top-down and directed by senior management. However, it remains incumbent on leaders to clearly establish corporate priorities which should steer this strategy.

Delegated ownership of knowledge governance works best when elements supportive of knowledge dynamics are already fully embedded into the operating model of the firm. Knowledge governance then is not treated as a separate or discrete function that needs explicit supervision, instead effective governance ‘just happens’, emerging as the collective product of the processes, behaviours and judgements of individual knowledge workers, which are all aligned with the clear and accepted priorities set out by the firm’s leadership. Of course, this effect can be supported and where necessary more formalised through performance management, both by fine-tuning corporate metrics to reflect the firm’s knowledge agenda, and by embedding some of the knowledge governance outcomes into the formal performance criteria, and through these even into reward mechanisms, of the workers concerned.

I have witnessed several examples across diverse industries of initially stridently promoted knowledge governance initiatives or programmes failing or being eventually quietly abandoned by management when promised benefits did not readily materialise. Successful examples, by contrast, tended to be the low-key and incremental implementations of knowledge governance elements into the firm’s operating model, gradually embedding these into the roles, processes, and the culture of the firm. Having promoted knowledge governance as a concept and then having set out a number of propositions that should help to shape an effective implementation approach, I accept the gentle irony of my final advice to management not to launch a knowledge governance programme per se.

Proposition 10: A knowledge governance strategy should not be tackled as a discrete and high-visibility change programme. Instead, it should be gradually embedded into the firm’s operating model to become an integral part of the corporate processes, culture and strategy.

8.      Conclusion

Leaders in today’s industry are acutely aware of how important a corporate asset knowledge is, and the potential competitive advantage that could be achieved should this be governed in an effective way¹⁶². They are also well aware that the issue has recently developed far beyond the domain of IT systems. Yet organisational literature to-date has largely failed to set out clearly and holistically how a knowledge governance strategy should be designed and implemented in practice, and the key underlying principles that need to be factored in during this process.

In this unapologetically normative paper, I have distilled a considerable volume of relevant academic literature and, blending these with my own practical experience of knowledge management, produced ten practical propositions to tackle this need. Firms that choose to implement knowledge governance strategies which adhere to these propositions are likely to enhance their internal knowledge dynamics in an integrated way which holistically tackles explicit and tacit knowledge, involves all levels within the organisation and is sensitive to the cultural expectations of its knowledge workers. This approach should also firmly embed the appropriate knowledge governance micro-foundations within the operating model to ensure that knowledge transactions are naturally aligned with the corporate processes, strategy and priorities.

This article is a modest first-pass attempt at setting out an actionable management theory in this area. I hope that with further theoretical development, backed by a growing body of empirical evidence, we will over time steer our understanding of knowledge governance into the territory of recognised best practice.

Copyright © 2014 by Piotr Ney. All rights reserved.

No part of this work may be published, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the author.

[The full table of references is available on request]