What are knowledge workers in a knowledge society?

One of the recurring themes when talking about the discipline knowledge management is the knowledge society. This type of society marks a difference between its predecessors 'the industrialised society' and 'the information society'. I refer to it as predecessor, but have we already passed the information society? I believe we have not. So are we talking about an information society when talking about a knowledge society, and vice versa? Perhaps we do. And perhaps also something to blog about at a later stage. Right now, I just want to emphasise on a part of a knowledge society and that is its knowledge workers.

As factories move away from Europe, because labour is becoming too expensive, European organisations are focusing (or in some instances 'should be focusing') on innovation. Becoming innovative means opening new doors and entering new territories. To understand these new territories you should have the latest knowledge and therefore organisation should consist of knowledge workers. And this is where among other things knowledge management kicks in. In order to shift the paradigm within organisations to knowledge workers, there should be a good guidance on both the organisational structure and culture to create a space where knowledge workers can work, because these workers need to assimilate themselves to new abilities.

Some of the abilities that are required as knowledge workers are:

• they should be flexible in adapting to change
• open to multiple tolerated failure or in other words the apprentice model (because over time you develop better by making lots of small mistakes) - Thanks to Dave Snowden's latest keynote at KMWorld
• adaptive capacity

These abilities will assist organisations to becoming more innovative on the basis of emphasizing on knowledge workers. Dave Snowden highlights this in a great anecdote between a chef and the recipe book user. He states that "how many knowledge management programmes are being run on the basis of making recipes, rather than on the basis of creating chefs". And a chef is a knowledge worker, because out of deeply generated experience over time, he or she can adapt to any situation and still prepare the best dish, where a recipe book user should have the requirements mentioned in the book before getting close to prepare a recipe successful. 

Link this with best practice and good practice programmes, and you know why most of the time knowledge management programmes failed to show its value

New management style

Inside Knowledge Management recently published an article "Thought Leader: Don't connect the dots; watch the noise" in which John Bordeaux stresses out that the traditional management style (where leaders have a controlled function) does not meet the fast changing environment of businesses. A new management style is emerging that is nurturing networks and relationships. In my latest dissertation I expressed this movement as follow:

moving from a theory in which organisational features are being traced back in a lineair way to historical or cultural factors, to a theory in which organisational features are influenced by so many variables that the over-all behaviour of organisations can only be understood as an emergent consequence of the hollistic sum of behaviours embedded within. Thus, behaviour is non-lineair and there is an understanding that small changes and shifts in such behaviour can have signigicantly large implications

In other words, "don't connect the dots, watch the noise"!

FT and complexity theory

This morning I read an article in the Financial Times about the effect of the Internet, the interconnectedness of everything and the human mind. This article drew my attention as I just finished my dissertation about leadership, organisational learning and complexity theory.

The unprecedented demands made of our brains in the 21st century can be stressful, to be sure. We are required to make lateral leaps in our imaginations in a daily basis; to hold several competing ideas in our minds at the same time; to work in various time-frames and shades of thought

The hyperlink syndrome, the way our minds copy the workings of the Internet and flit sharply from one idea to another, means that we have become addicted rather than the depth of something. The contemporary mind needs to be elastic and happy to forage in alien fields. We are yanked out of our comfort zones and must appear happy at the prospect. The methodological toiler who moves from beginning, to middle, to end is regarded as a dullard."

Aspden, P. (2008) What did you do on the Internet today? in: Financial Times, Saturday September 6/Sunday September 7

This article illustrates the importance of complexity theory in contemporary organisation and how organisational learning should adapt the same developement as with the human mind by embracing complexity theory. In my dissertation I illustrated this as:

traditional organisations of the last century have evolved from bureaucracy with clear boundaries and internal areas of authority to a new form, which has fluid and flexible external and internal boundaries ... moving from a theory in which organisational features are being traced back in a lineair way to historical or cultural factors, to a theory in which organisational features are influenced by so many variables that the over-all behaviour of organisations can only be understood as an emergent consequence of the holistic sum of beaviours embedded within. Thus, behaviour is nonlineair and there is an understanding that small changes and shifts in such behaviour can have significantly large implications