In my last post, I pointed to the problem of the absence of work on
Knowledge Claim Evaluation in Knowledge management, offered some
thoughts by way of explaining why this was the case, and ended with a
statement about what was required for the job ahead. My account
asserted the importance of Knowledge Claim Evaluation (KCE), but did
little to explain why I thought it should be such a central concern of
KM.
In my first post, "
All Life is Problem Solving",
I wrote about the importance of error elimination knowledge making and
problem solving and said the following. The last of the three steps in
making knowledge is error elimination or "matching". This step is the
gateway to knowledge. But it is, as Popper pointed out, fundamentally
negative in character. It is about eliminating mistakes and not about
supporting any of one's tentative solutions. In animals lacking
consciousness, mistakes are eliminated, when the animal receives
negative reinforcement from the environment for selecting the wrong
solution. That is, the animal in question can only learn by
experiencing the negative consequences of its mistaken expectation and
ensuing decision. Often the wrong choice means that the animal making
the choice is eliminated along with its mistake. Animals with
consciousness and especially sharing language have a great advantage
over other animals. We can eliminate errors and learn by testing our
solutions through the surrogate processes of criticism, controlled
testing, and comparative analysis, before we take a decision. We,
unlike other animals, can manage our knowledge making so that "our
worst ideas die in our stead", and our best ones inform our decisions
and actions. But to do so, we must use our gift of language and be
diligent in criticism, testing, and evaluation of our tentative
solutions. In other words, we must attempt to eliminate our errors
through KCE.
In my second post on "
Organizational Problem Solving",
I noted that KCE is at the very center of knowledge processing and
knowledge production. Think about it. Without it, what is the
difference between information and knowledge? How do we know that we
are integrating knowledge rather than just information? Or that the
“knowledge” we’re using in operational business processes is of high
quality? Absent a social process in organizations, be it formal
or informal, through which competing claims can be held to tests of
veracity or verisimilitude, how can we possibly make judgments about
truth versus falsity? Knowledge Claim Evaluation, then, is what
gives us the ability to know knowledge when we see it, and therefore to
know when we've produced it.
Organizations clearly differ in the quality and success of their
Knowledge Claim Evaluation processes and in the quality of knowledge
produced by them. KM has many objectives. Enhancing organizational
capability to get information from external sources, enhancing
creativity and capability to formulate relevant knowledge claims,
enhancing the process of sharing knowledge claims that have survived
KCE are all very important. But what can Knowledge Managers do that
could possibly be more important, than enhancing Knowledge Claim
Evaluation the very sub-process that is the gateway to knowledge? I'll
leave you to ask that question of yourself, and to wonder, as I do, why
so few practitioners in KM talk or write about such enhancements.
For More Information
You’ll find much more information on the views offered in this post,
and on training in the New Knowledge Management at three web sites:
www.dkms.com, www.macroinnovation.com, and www.kmci.org. Many papers on
the New Knowledge Management are available for downloading there. Our
Excerpt from The Open Enterprise . . .
may also be purchased there. Our print books: Mark W. McElroy, The New
Knowledge Management, my Enterprise Information Portals and Knowledge
Management, and our Key Issues in The New Knowledge Management, are
available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Elsevier.
