“Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most are unable to form such opinions. ” ALBERT EINSTEIN.
"As in the case of the artists, the outstanding scientists were reverent before the mysteries that they investigated, but irreverent with the prevailing beliefs and attitudes. Eminent scientists are those capable of making" rich associations of ideas ". MARILYN FERGUSON, The World of Aquarius Today.
The buzzword in management today is innovation, yet few know what they are talking about. You may wonder why this conclusive statement is due.
Without trying to be conclusive in the answers, I will try to engage you in a creative dialogue in order to delve into this topic.
Albert Einstein once stated: "… I have never produced anything creative with my rational thinking", a phrase that makes us think of the validity of the rational paradigm as a promoter of creativity and innovation.
Rational thinking can be understood in a simple way, as that "based on objective rules", and simply constitutes a way of acting within the limits of objectivity of the senses and the mind, through which the human being interprets, evaluates and gives explanations to natural phenomena based on linear cause and effect relationships.
On the other hand, the scientific method is generally a system for the study of observable, repeatable and predictable phenomena, emphasizing the objectivity of the data.
Now, all of the above seems rational and acceptable and therefore applicable to all kinds of human experiences, whether they are typical of closed systems or open systems.
Be very careful with generalizations, because although it is true, rational thinking and its preferred son, the scientific method, are paradigms designed to address the reality of mechanical systems, or closed systems, as they are called in General Systems Theory, are inapplicable in the treatment of the problems of open or social systems. In this regard, Peter F. Drucker warned that one of the most important problems experienced by companies in the 20th century is the over-administration to which they have been subjected and, consequently, the under-management that they have suffered. This is clearly demonstrated in the excess of norms and systems aimed at defining the best ways for people to carry out their work, systematically omitting the intellectual and creative capacities of their people,Among which we can highlight the ISO standards, the Balance Scorecard, the Management by Results, Six Sigma, Statistical Quality Control, among others.
Fritjof Capra in his book “The Crucial Point”, affirms that one of the most serious problems that the social or natural sciences are experiencing today is the product of the consequences of having applied the methods of closed systems to the treatment of open or social systems..
The traditional approach followed in the development of administrative theory has started from considering it as a closed, deterministic system and subject to be planned in accordance with the cause-effect-cause behavior that follows linear logic.
In the linear, mechanical world, of cause and effect, the systems created by the human being are to serve who created them, being their creator, the human being, he becomes their master and lord, so these inanimate systems, for not having a "soul", because they are inert, because they are not autopoietic, they depend 100% on who created them or who operates them to function. In other words, they are limited and incapable of self-development, much less of changing autonomously.
Even though these systems have been constituted by human beings, as is the case of organizations, the people that make them up, which are open systems, are considered as an inert resource of the created system. Hence the name that human participation has in organizations, "labor".
Of course, labor, as a resource, must be managed according to the rules of closed systems, which are supported by the detailed definition of all the details of work routines, thus delimiting, not only what that the hands should do, if not more importantly, how they should do it, thus making it impossible to use the creative and innovative capacities of the people who make up the company.
In this order of things, "labor" is classified, in the same way in which other materials are classified, to group it into homogeneous and specialized subsystems called generically departments, in which standard and repetitive tasks are performed, which then they join others of different specialty in order to build the goods or services that the organization performs.
Note to begin with that this type of organization operates in the total and radical absence of the knowledge and understanding of its people, as well as systems that promote it. The managers and leaders of this type of organization operate under the belief that they are the only ones who know everything about the company and how to run it.
All this seems logical, and it is the norm accepted by many managers and entrepreneurs, even today, a time of new realities that demand other forms of management, based on knowledge and understanding. However, many continue to believe that to carry out this type of management, you simply have to add a new resource, knowledge, to the company and treat it in the same way as other resources have treated it in the past. Nothing more wrong.
I mean, the orthodox or traditional business system is the result of fragmenting the organization into subsystems called departments, where each one has been designed to perform a specialized function, which is evaluated by also fragmented indicators.
All this seems normal within traditional logic, however, if we delve a little and approach it from holistic paradigms, normality appears as abnormal.
Let's see, by concentrating on the parts independently, the logical thing is that each part is as efficient as possible as a necessary condition for achieving the efficiency of the total system, however, this is true only when the parts are independent, a condition that it is not fulfilled in the companies, since the departments are interdependent and the existence of each one is justified by the existence of the others.
With this reality of interdependence and mutual need, the efficiency of the parts does not lead to the efficiency of the total system.
However, the Orthodox chiefs acting in accordance with the ancient principles, define from the heights of their position the expected results of their department, from where they start to define a whole series of detailed actions tending to identify the manual, simple and repeatable works that your subordinates must perform to achieve the expected results. In this business model there is no room for knowledge and understanding, nor for creative innovation.
Current administrative paradigms prevent managers from realizing that innovation is not possible in orthodox organizations, and that is why they insist on wanting to add creativity and innovation to old administrative structures.
So far, everything seems normal and is accepted, to the point that many consulting companies continue to sell transition programs towards knowledge organizations without removing old paradigms, producing what we could call “a chronicle of an announced failure”.
As long as company management remains guided by control and hierarchy, its operational reality will continue to resist being managed under modern principles of knowledge management.
In order to synthesize, the human understanding and its knowledge are impossible to manage through the paradigms of the exact sciences, there must be a paradigmatic change in both power structures and operations.
Here begins to emerge what some authors like Gary Hamel call "the future of administration." G. Hamel maintains that "… while technology has advanced significantly in all its fields, the administration remained anchored to the paradigms of the early twentieth century." And that makes it impossible to create and re-create companies and organizations capable of taking advantage of innovations. Furthermore, because it cannot adapt to the changes in today's world, the administration becomes a retarder of global progress, or shows itself unable to regulate and conduct it, a situation that is evident in the problems that the world is experiencing today.
The explicit recognition of the importance that the human being has as an integral and integral entity of the knowledge society, radically changes the bases and paradigmatic principles of the administration of the 21st century.
We can no longer continue to conceptualize the collaborators of organizations as assets, nor as resources, nor as labor, although we continue to euphemistically call them human resources.
Let us remember that the resources that companies have are labor, land and capital, to which information and very recently knowledge have been added.
The data, being inert resources, have been treated from the paradigms of the exact sciences, for which their administration has been a prolongation of the administrative orthodoxy. Data and information are part of what is called explicit knowledge, which is knowledge that can be articulated, encoded and stored in some type of medium. It can be immediately transmitted to others.
The most common form of explicit knowledge is expressed in manuals, documents, and procedures. Knowledge can also be audiovisual and is produced by electronic multimedia means, works of art and product design, expressions that can be seen as other forms of explicit knowledge. Other forms of explicit knowledge are those where human skills, motivations and knowledge are externalized.
However, not only are there explicit knowledge, but there is also tacit knowledge, which is what is not universally accepted. One of Polanyi's famous aphorisms is: "We know more than we can say." Tacit knowledge commonly consists of habits and cultural aspects that we hardly recognize in ourselves. In the field of knowledge management, reference is made to knowledge that only the person knows and that it is difficult to explain to another person (example: how to ride a bicycle).
These small large differences make it evident that the hierarchical and control administrative treatment applied to the administration of inert resources, is applicable in the administration of explicit knowledge, but not in the management of tacit knowledge, for which this form of administration is shown inadequate. We can go further and affirm that to lead companies and organizations from tacit knowledge and understanding, orthodox administrative systems are incapable.
Innovation and creativity dwell in tacit knowledge and understanding, but not in explicit knowledge, therefore we can easily gather that there is very little contribution that the so-called current and orthodox administrative sciences provide when leading intelligent organizations, motivated by creativity and innovation.
Believing that under the orthodox application of the administration we could treat administrative creativity and innovation is, in all cases, a great fallacy.
However, the evidence shows us that we continue on this path and accept as valid the proposals of authors who continue to act and propose more of the same by wanting to subject the management of knowledge and understanding to the old administrative molds of control and hierarchy. It is worth mentioning the profuse appearance of methods to measure emotional intelligence, methods to identify the competences, or establishment of command instances, where the idea of managing the company as a chessboard continues to be implicitly present.
Thus, traditional administrative acts can be assimilated to the acts performed by a chess player, the player is the "King and Master" of the chips, the chips, although it is true that they perform specialized functions, cannot decide how or when use them, because they can only be moved by the player according to their strategy, a strategy that is not known and much less understood by the chips, because they are resources that the player moves at will, even sacrificing them if the defined strategy demands it. The hierarchical player is the boss or manager, who gives orders to the chips so that they move according to their skills and the strategy chosen for the game. Both in victory and in defeat, the chips are not responsible.
However, in the business game, victory is the player, not the chips, and defeat if it is the fault of the chips.
This is a game typical of the paradigm "zero sum game", because the winning of one of the contenders is the consequence that the other loses. The strategy of the game is guided by actions that make the contestant who is considered the enemy fail.
If we make a comparison between what a manager or a traditional boss does with his people and what the chess player does with his chips, there doesn't seem to be much difference, then let's think what would happen with the game, with the player and with the cards if they were living and intelligent beings, autopoietic, autonomous, with the capacity to think, create and innovate ?; Would the rules and regulations be the same ?; Would the win-lose strategy be the applicable one ?; How to make sure that each and all the cards are aligned to achieve a single objective ?; How to achieve the synchrony of the various minds? Obviously, the rules of the game must change. Already the all powerful player who moves chips at will, has no place in the game where the chips are smart and able to think collectively about the next moves,in defining experiential strategies, in changing strategies if the environment demands it.
En este nuevo juego o “juego con toda mi capacidad” tanto el jugador como el gerente y las fichas son actores, no “espectadores”, lo cual implica la utilización de capacidades diferentes, dentro de las cuales destacan las siguientes: la visión holística; los paradigmas inductivos y creativos; la autopoiesis como capacidad de auto desarrollo; la no linealidad; la conciencia de ser parte de un todo interdependiente e interrelacionado, entre otras.
So the new managers in the face of this new reality must stop seeing themselves as the spectators of the company's game, as the only ones capable of having a holistic and comprehensive vision of the game or the company, in order to conceive of themselves as just another participant. In this regard, Francis Bacon said: "But men must know that, in the theater of human life, being spectators is only reserved for God and angels," he concluded then, we are all actors.
We live in a world that is frantically demanding smart companies, managed from knowledge and understanding, however, we want to remain tied to the old recipes of the administration, either because we know them or because we feel safe with them. Here both orthodox knowledge and security prevent managers from making the leap toward creating organizational climates prone to learning and change.
Orthodox managers believe and behave as if they were the gods of organizations, because they believe that organizations are closed systems that they control and dominate through the application of mechanical administrative systems inspired by deterministic and deductive paradigms. This conception makes managers feel that they have in their hands all the threads of the business puppet.
An entrepreneurial puppet cannot be driven by the management of understanding and knowledge, since its threads prevent it by flowing through them only orders, and reciprocally obedience.
In an intelligent organization, the entrepreneur puppeteer must disappear because he is the main bottleneck on the road to knowledge and understanding management. His work must mutate from the control and hierarchy towards the development of a process of assisted accompaniment or knowledge coaching, through which he must cut all the threads that move the puppet, giving him his freedom and trusting him so that as a result of it he generates a culture whose point of support is collaboration and confidence in the capabilities of its collaborators. In this new reality the threads of the puppet's dependency mutate into relationships of interdependence, mutual aid and synergy.
Obviously, for the creation of this culture the old recipe book of traditional administrative systems is not applicable, but of a new and emerging management system that uses knowledge and understanding coaching in the empowerment of all its pupils or collaborators in the development of a culture colored by trust, mutual aid, intra-discipline, team work and continuous learning as a product of putting oneself at the service of others.
The coaching of knowledge and understanding is developed within an agreed culture where each participant is both a coach of himself and a coach of the other pupils, thus creating a business learning community, in which to share and enrich points of view it is the norm for the creation of new knowledge.
One of the most powerful limitations that threatens knowledge and understanding coaching is the type of education our professionals have undergone. Some of the characteristics that most threaten are the following: a rote education; repetitive competitive; subject to constant evaluation; individualistic; specialized; fragmentary; absolute; recipe-oriented and universally applicable.
To lead organizations "for knowledge", they must operate as learning communities.
In a learning community, people learn by sharing their views, so knowledge is continually created as a result of this exchange. When an organization behaves like a learning community, its dominant value is continuous learning.
When we refer to continuous learning, we are not referring to explicit knowledge, but to tacit knowledge, so that the organizational learning community needs to be made up of administrative systems that provoke employees to think of new ways of doing business or providing innovative services., who share their points of view with their colleagues in order to always find new and innovative ways of doing the job. For this, the company needs to work in climates of trust, mutual aid, active participation, and with flexible, simple and innovative operating systems. Furthermore, its leadership must place special emphasis on seeking to create an organizational culture that promotes and rewards innovation, new ideas,that encourages employees to dare and above all and in a special way to make administrative processes increasingly efficient, easy and above all transparent for customers.
By administrative transparency we understand that administrative processes collaborate with obtaining organizational results, they are a very simple means and not an obstacle as they are when the organization is bureaucratized, similarly it must behave like the immune system of the human body, which is there to assist in achieving results where your participation is necessary, but not sufficient.
In this sense, and for organizations to be true communities of learning in practice, they must bear in mind some vital principles such as the following:
- All employees of the organization as a learning community should be aware of how much they have to teach and how much they have to learn.All employees of the organization as a learning community should know that they lack much to know and that they learn it. Sharing what they already know.The attitude of the collaborators of the organization as a learning community towards change must be seen as an opportunity for development, which is reflected in the awareness of understanding ourselves as beings in constant formation, autopoietic and who are always in Incompleteness. The success of the other members of the organization as a learning community is its own success, which is achieved through collaboration and cooperation practiced in an environment of intense, interested and frank participation.The threats that are normally perceived as a consequence of the change are interpreted as opportunities. It makes the organization as a learning community act as a single entity in carrying out intelligent, common and simple actions of its collaborators to deal with situations of significant complexity. As a learning community, it operates as a team that develops and enhances itself through the interaction produced by the constant exchanges of points of view and specialized knowledge, practices and information, to help each other in the development of the new abilities that dwell in each participant of the community to discuss opportunities to advance new ideas or projects of common interest.Organizations as learning communities start from the collective and individual experience at the same time, oriented and driven by the figure of a coach of knowledge and understanding who, through Socratic doubt, keeps alive the illusions of pupils in always seeking a better system.; It also plays a role of facilitator, challenger, teacher, so that the team achieves its cohesion and synchronicity in the constant search for creative responses that make unique the opportunities that changes in the environment generate. Organizations as learning communities act on the basis relationships of trust, mutual help and the constant search for excellence and collective and therefore individual success. Each participant or pupil should feel comfortable being recognized as a source of fresh wisdom,as well as recognizing the virtues of his peers, being aware that by recognizing the virtues of others he creates his own. Each participant in the organization as a learning community perceives the importance of feeling important, which makes him bring the best of Yes by enriching the group with their points of view and their paradigms. The contributions of the organization's pupils as a learning community are always aimed at enriching the points of view of their colleagues, through cooperative actions, which makes them contribute their competition to the competition of others. Never to criticism or destruction. The needs of the organization as a learning community always take precedence over individual needs, because these are met by meeting those of the community.The knowledge and understanding that is worth in the company to be different, is not the one that is acquired through the hiring of brains, but the one that is created in the community based on the contracted person. Both knowledge and understanding cannot be measured and much less accumulated in electronic or physical means, therefore they are not susceptible to being directed from orthodox structures, much less controlled.The communities of understanding and knowledge are transdisciplinary and traditional disciplines give way to new apt disciplines. for the specific development of each organization as a learning community.It is the one that is created in the community based on the contracted. Both knowledge and understanding cannot be measured and much less accumulated in electronic or physical means, therefore they are not susceptible to being directed from orthodox structures, nor much less controlled. Communities of understanding and knowledge are transdisciplinary and traditional disciplines give way to new disciplines suitable for the specific development of each organization as a learning community.It is the one that is created in the community based on the contracted. Both knowledge and understanding cannot be measured and much less accumulated in electronic or physical means, therefore they are not susceptible to being directed from orthodox structures, nor much less controlled. Communities of understanding and knowledge are transdisciplinary and traditional disciplines give way to new disciplines suitable for the specific development of each organization as a learning community.Communities of understanding and knowledge are transdisciplinary and traditional disciplines give way to new disciplines suitable for the specific development of each organization as a learning community.Communities of understanding and knowledge are transdisciplinary and traditional disciplines give way to new disciplines suitable for the specific development of each organization as a learning community.
Thanks to knowledge, people, organizations and institutions create new realities, adapt to changes in the environment to fundamentally take advantage of their opportunities. In the Knowledge Society, knowledge has become an effective way to understand and understand what is happening in the environment. With this, companies are more flexible and capable of generating significant value for society; people are more active and enterprising; and governments are more democratic and representative to better serve the interests of citizens.
Given the important level of transformation and instability of the Knowledge Society, knowledge management has become a strategic and key element in organizations.
Managing change requires, first of all, that employees acquire new knowledge as a result of very diverse syntheses of professional orthodox knowledge. But in addition, organizations must know how to create the ideal environment to motivate the pupils of managed organizations as communities of knowledge and understanding in mutant processes of human development as a product of the collective contribution of individual knowledge.
This new and different work experience creates and recreates people's knowledge, and, at the same time, also generates collective learning, beyond what is learned individually. People really learn when they share their work experiences with others who are in new situations. In this way, learning is, first, an interpersonal process that later becomes intra-personal.
Collective learning is generated through the synergy caused by the integration of different knowledge, making organizational knowledge more than the sum of them when they are taken independently. Remember that knowledge and understanding are generated when they are used and shared.
It is very important to be clear about the types of knowledge that organizations use, because their intelligence is derived from them, in addition to understanding that this knowledge is interdependent and that as a result of their relationship, understanding emerges, which is so necessary in creativity and innovation processes.
Tacit knowledge: this type of knowledge requires human contact through which people share their points of view in order to enrich themselves with other people's points of view. For this reason, the strategies to create it should be aimed at promoting its shared exchange through communities of practice (a group specialized in a certain subject), knowledge fairs or simply creating an organizational culture that facilitates and promotes informal and formal contacts between collaborators. Technologies for data processing and transfer can be useful instruments for the exchange of tacit knowledge.It is important to emphasize that tacit knowledge cannot be administered either by the principles of administrative orthodoxy or by information systems and the use of technologies.
Explicit knowledge: It consists of obtaining that the holders of that knowledge agree to translate it into documents. In this way it can be stored and retrieved by anyone who needs it at the right time. Data processing technologies, mistakenly called information technologies, play a fundamental role here.
We can combine this knowledge in four ways, namely:
- We go from tacit to tacit knowledge: The step of knowledge “from tacit to tacit” occurs through socialization processes, that is, through the acquisition of knowledge through direct interaction with the outside world, with other people, with other cultures, etc. Example: teacher and students. We go from tacit to explicit knowledge: It is produced through externalization, which we could define as the process of expressing something. Outsourcing is converting images and / or words using dialogue. Example: Writing autobiographies. From explicit to explicit knowledge: This step is called combining. As its name suggests, different forms of explicit knowledge are combined through documents or databases. Example: A book that is made taking ideas from several books.From explicit to tacit knowledge: It is the internalization of knowledge, and consists of the incorporation of tacit knowledge by the individuals of any organization. Example: Live experiences, get to know other countries, News, Etc.
Once understood that tacit knowledge is more understanding than knowledge, managing it becomes more of an art than a scientific procedure.
On the other hand, we can infer that tacit knowledge is that in which creativity and innovation dwell, both essential energies in companies of the 21st century.
Tacit knowledge management must be approached from holistic principles; inductive; probabilistic; creative; unique; in poorly structured and organized environments as production teams; competent; in solidarity, and led by coaches who bring out the best in each pupil for the benefit of the organizational community and consequently in their own.
Tacit knowledge is developed from social relationships, therefore it cannot be subject to the limits and fractions of explicit knowledge, but rather try to perceive them as an indivisible whole that Ken Wilber, in the introduction to his work “Consciousness without borders "he says:" It is as if our habitual perception of reality is nothing more than an insignificant island, surrounded by a vast ocean of consciousness, unsuspected and unmapped, whose waves continually crash against the reefs that it has erected as barriers our daily perception ”of explicit knowledge, to develop this culture within the organization it is necessary to keep in mind the following principles:
- The first thing we must do is convince employees that corporate learning is not simply a product of classroom training, in any of its forms. The best training is experience. “Classrooms are good establishments to form the basic skills and the underlying foundations, but, in experience, it is where knowledge-how is acquired.” Employees or pupils need to know that learning is a group activity. The deepest and most useful learning comes from sharing tacit knowledge, not just data. Says Wicks, “Teams must work and learn together and not just in their unit, but with others across the company. Daniel Kim wrote: "If the mental models, those mental determinations,the frames of reference and value structures that everyone uses to see reality are not explicit and shared, so information and knowledge pass, but they are not connected. ”Sensitize the entire organization to the paradigms of the new science, of in such a way that it makes collaborators feel like living organisms capable of making and re-making themselves continuously, as autopoietic and capable beings. Awakening human capacities to share what they know and perceive with the aim of enriching it as a product of new and different ways of seeing the reality that other people have.Constitute realization teams so that through the practice of creating new knowledge and understanding from the known, specific and specific problems are solved that are impossible to solve with orthodox knowledge.Clear departmental boundaries by setting up performance teams where what matters is the team's outcome, regardless of departmental accomplishments. Synergize tacit knowledge with explicit knowledge so that experiences of success and failure are documented in order to Having them as a reference. From this new perspective, the collaborator required by intelligent organizations must be versatile, be oriented towards achieving more and better joint results, have a higher level of autonomy and be able to adapt quickly to new conditions and roles, thus such as being able to work in a team and solving problems together. It is not the explicit, theoretical knowledge acquired that is valued in this new worker, but his ability to adapt and learn,obtaining results with these new knowledge. "Knowing how to do in context" is what is known as "Labor Competencies".
As a complement, let's see some directions of change necessary to transform current organizations into learning organizations:
- From generic classroom training to tailored education and learning, based on each person's knowledge, skills, motivations, and values, from case studies - academic simulation - to action-based learning to solve real problems, with a real sense of responsibility for success or failure. From individual capacities to organizational capacities. From individual to team participation. From the classroom to learning in all places and times, in the workplace. Based on specific knowledge, to activities based on holistic strategies that seek understanding through relationships. From external presenters and facilitators to the creation of internal challengers. From limited training sessions to unlimited (continuous, permanent).From participation based on cognitive solution of problems to solutions based on values and motivations, from local learning models to global learning models applied to local realities.
This approach integrates elements such as: working in teams or groups, formed by their complementary areas of knowledge depending on the problems, crossing organizational boundaries or making the functional structure more flexible, achieving an efficient communication system across the length and breadth of the organization, the strategic nature of the dynamics of the segmentation or formation of groups, which merge or separate temporarily for the treatment of different problems, the essential nature of dialogue and discussion, decentralization in decision-making, and factors Motivation through stimulation based on participation, as well as self-evaluation, as a self-regulation mechanism for teams and the organization. All of them constitute elements that, as Shein has pointed out,"They should not be taken in isolation but integrated".
These values and principles constitute the cornerstone of organizations for the 21st century, I invite you to sculpt in it the work of art that will distinguish and identify the DNA of your company or organization. I insist that each company or organization is a unique work of art, impossible to copy, and the primary task of every coach of knowledge and understanding is to carry out, with the collaboration of their pupils, this work of art, which by the way is never It is finished, but always in the process of being done and re-done.
"The wealth of a people is not that of the soil, but that of the brain"
“A corporation is like a tree. There is a part that is visible (the fruits) and another part that is hidden (the roots). If you only care about picking the fruits, the tree may die. For the tree to grow and continue to bear fruit, the roots must be healthy and nourished. This is valid for companies: if you only care about the financial results and ignore the hidden values, the company will not survive in the long term ”.
EDVINSSON, Director of Intellectual Capital of Skandia.
