Sharing Knowledge
Peter M. Senge
June 1998
Traditionally we've hoarded knowledge and other assets believing that 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?
Our mental model is that knowledge is something that individuals acquire and possess.Look at the language we use in connection with knowledge work. We talk about "knowledge acquisition" -- something we acquire, then possess. In our customers' mind-set, "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 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.
Individuals do acquire information 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.
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.
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 more experience being parts of great teams, but the "chemistry" of any great team is a collective phenomenon. Much of the knowledge that we're really interested in inside organizations is just like the chemistry of a fine sports team. It's a group of people who have learned what it means to function together. That takes a certain mind-set and a lot of patience and practice.
Interrelationships
If you take a good look at your relationship with customers, you might say, "We're committed to the customer, we're committed to the customer, we're committed to the customer" -- but how do you actually view the customer? One senior executive at a major corporation said that he always felt he was committed to the customer, but he eventually realized that he actually saw the customer as his boss. It wasn't until an environment of real trust started to develop within his organization that he could honestly start to feel truly committed to the customer. It was the first time in his professional life that he felt like service wasn't just about pleasing the boss.
So there might be real connections between the quality of relationships within and beyond the organization. Laying a foundation of trust is what allows people to build meaningful relationships with partners, suppliers, distributors, and customers. We often forget that real commitment is a function of the quality of relationships. When times are tough, those relationships endure.
It's like anything in life. Marriages go through a lot of crises. Most don't make it. Those that do have some foundation that comes into play. There is a deep level of trust and mutual regard that can allow you to go through a very difficult time. Companies are no different. And customers are no different. They are just people and it's all about how people relate to one another.
The trouble is that most business relationships work like dysfunctional families. Everybody is basically concentrating on just pleasing the boss and avoiding getting their ass kicked, rather than on building real relationships.
I think that the changing business environment will make it harder for companies to adopt these new management paradigms. Increasing competitiveness, for example, will create much more stress. And any psychologist will tell you that under stress most people revert to their most primitive behaviors. Therefore, the more stress we put on our organizations, the more their tendency will be to revert to their most primitive behaviors. And in business organizations, at least in the West, what are our most primitive behaviors? Management control, time pressure, do it faster, do it cheaper.
You see these problems manifested in the way most companies are trying to speed up basic processes. Of course, fundamental processes in our organizations do need to be more responsive and resilient. They need to be both faster and more adaptable. But the way you get there is virtually the antithesis of what most western business managers do. We know, for example, that it's necessary to develop new products at least one or two years faster. So that is an external stress in a way. But how do we speed things up? Under stress we revert to our most primitive behavior. We put more pressure on the program managers. We put in more stringent financial controls.
The irony is that to do things faster you often have to go slower. You have to be more reflective. You have to develop real trust. You have to develop the abilities of people to truly think together. Why? Because it requires you to go through fundamental changes: redesigns of the most basic sorts. You need to build a shared understanding of how the present system works and why it takes so long. And, you need to have people who can trust one another through difficult systemic changes.
Most reengineering efforts aspire to build shared understanding of how things work today and to redesign the processes. But, the consultant's "as is" map of the current systems is usually grossly deficient, because people do not trust anyone enough to tell the truth of how things really work. Likewise, there is little deep commitment to change.
Research on how people learn tells us what we all know as parents -- learning requires safety. Without safety, it is difficult or impossible for people to learn. Stress compromises safety. And so most organizations that are trying desperately to do things faster will fail dismally. They will get a little faster. But as Deming used to say, "Sure, you'll accomplish the results, but you'll destroy the organization doing it. And you'll destroy the people in it." So the present environment will, if anything, create more pressure to revert.
The Leader's Role
Few leaders understand the depth of commitment required to build a learning organization. As Bill O'Brien, a retired CEO, once put it: "This involves the willingness to change our mental models." This is much easier said than done. In practice, it is disorienting and deeply humbling, because our old mental models were the keys to our confidence and our competence. To be a real learner is to be ignorant and incompetent. Not many top executives may be up for that.
A learning organization represents a fundamental shift in culture. According to Edgar Schein, most top executives have little understanding of the task of developing culture. It requires patience, reflectiveness, and a willingness to find a new balance between focusing on results and focusing on how we are operating while we are trying to achieve those results. So they shy away from it.
There is also a question about what role the operative leaders will play in the new organization. We are going through a profound change in the nature of managerial work. The job of the people at the top was to figure out what was going on, make all the key decisions, and create the control mechanisms that would translate top management's decisions into coordinated actions. Planning, organizing, controlling -- the holy trinity of authoritarian management. Today, it is no longer possible to figure it all out from the top. Even if we did, top management's insights and decisions would be obsolete by the time they reached the front ranks.
Consequently, what exists today is extraordinary anxiety at the top. Many executives are starting to get the message that their jobs are changing, and they don't know what they're becoming and they don't know if they're qualified to do their jobs anymore. They hear that they've got to empower people, and they've got to push decisions down. But they're saying: "If everyone else is making all those decisions, what decisions am I going to get to make?" So naturally they're schizophrenic. They push decisions out for a while, but as soon as things get tough they pull them right back, because they're terrified that soon they might not have any work. Or even any job at all.
And it's not just that senior managers feel they are losing control. Giving up control is very difficult, but it's virtually impossible if you have no idea of what you might be getting in its place. In this case, the safety required for learning might revolve around having some positive image of the future. We can work on how to help senior managers not feel anxious about losing control, but it would be better to start helping people formulate a compelling image of what we might be moving towards, something that might be exciting enough and positive enough for people to say, "I'd be willing to give some of this up in order to try to move towards that." See, the big question leaders are asking themselves is, "What ring am I reaching out to grab as I let go of this other one? Because in between I'm hanging in space."
Now, that doesn't mean we're ever going to find a ring that's going to satisfy everybody. I don't think we're dealing with the majority. If 90 percent of the human energy is out there trying to resuscitate, revive and revitalize the old system of management, that wouldn't surprise me. But if we have 10 percent available to work on creating something really new, then that might be more than adequate.