Lecture 3 Flashcards
Objectified perspective
complex information that can be codified. It can be made explicit.
Knowledge as an object.
Explicit knowledge
Social practice perspective
Experience, skills, expertise.
Knowledge through practice
both tacit and explicit knowledge
What are the problems with managing knowledge sharing
- neglecting the tacit knowledge, practice based dimension of knowledge
- status of dominance of experts
- no knowledge sharing culture, including absence of psycohological safety and trust
- no sense of urgency
- lack of shared mission or purpose
- professional versus organizational identity
- lack of rewards
What is organizational learning
the process by which knowledge is created and shared
the process os acquiring knowledge that help organizations to perform better
What are the challenges of organizations
- lack of understanding how to use analytics
- difficulty to turn analytics insights into business actions
- organizational culture does not encourage sharing information
- lack of management support due to competing priorities
- lack of appropriate skills
- ability to get the data
- ineffective governance of data
- concerns with the data
What are the trade-offs?
- Security versus privacy
- Freedom versus control
- Independence versus dependence
- Upskilling versus downskilling
What is the main tensions of individuals and businesses
Individuals: willing to give up their privacy, freedom and independence, to explore new opportunities of the digitalization of everyday life
Business: keen on exploiting new opportunities deriving from the digitalization of everyday life, but sometimes with costs to some individuals
What is tacit knowledge
knowledge that is difficult to transfer to another person by means of writing it down of verbalizing it. It can be defined as skills, ideas and expertiences that people have but are not codified
with tacit knowledge people are not often aware of the knowledge they posses or how it can be valuable to others. Efective transfer of tacit knowlege generally requires extensive personal contact, regular interaction and trust.
Cycle of choice
Organizational learning.
- Learning under ambiguity
This happens when individuals learn and modify their understanding while being faced with ambiguity about what happened in the environment. The modified beliefs drive their individual actions which then influence organizational actions. Consequently, the organization learns and adapts its behaviour under ambiguity.
- Analytics may support making sense of the environment, and therefore help reduce uncertainty in individual and organizational actions.
- However, analytics may have a reverse effect if individuals rely too much on analytics. Getting lost in the translation of analytics insights into action yields learning under ambiguity.
- Next to that, by creating an analytical model, people tend to treat it later as ‘objective’ information, while there is a lot of subjectivity.
If organizations use analytics yet treat it as a black box, learning under ambiguity may increase, and my cause severe long term consequences.
- Role-constrained learning
this occurs when the link between individuals beliefs and actions is broken down. Individuals learn and change their beliefs and interpretations, but they are constrained in modifying their individual behaviour accordingly, because of their role descriptions, bureaucratic rules and standard operation procedure. Still, the organization learns without knowing that the knowledge of individuals is different from what they put in action.
- Analytics may help reduce role-constrained learning since it is expected to increase organizational agility and help fight inertia by providing timely information to the organization on how rules and routines need to be adapted.
- However, relying too much on analytics; individuals are expected to act solely based on analytics, they may not be able to apply their intuition and beliefs drawn from their personal experience.
- Audience learning
occurs when individual action is not adopted or integrated by the organization. While individuals change their actions based on what they learned, this learning does not affect organizational learning.
Thus, learning is happing on the individual level, but the organization does not change anything. It can also be just management itself that is blind to what is really happening on the work floor causing individual action being disconnected from the organizational action.
- Analytics can help overcome audience learning: individuals can use analytics to justify their actions to others. For instance, different viewpoints, arguments.
- Analytics increases transparency in organizations, by providing not only an analysis of what has happened in the past of what is happening in real time, but also by creating anticipations on what is likely to occur in the future.
- Nevertheless, analytics can also stimulate audience learning: people choose to use numbers and figures only when this data is aligned with the actions that they want to take. In practice, they try to cover up the action that they would have performed anyway for other reasons.
- In addition, people may even start playing numbers games and distorting the data that is stored in the information systems, in order to influence the analytics results so that they fit their actions.
- Superstitious learning
occurs when information about the causes of environmental changes is incomplete yet the organization assumes that environment actions are reactions to their own actions.
Also called: ego-centric learning: organizations adapt to a false interpretation of environmental changes since they do not take exogenous cause of environmental changes into account.
- By providing more information regarding what is happening in the market, how competitors are behaving and how customers react, analytics has the potential to limit superstitious learning.
- However, too heavy reliance on analytics could also reinforce superstitious learning. If organization keeps using analytics solely to understand what organizational actions caused an environmental response and adapt accordingly, they may start focusing only on actions that have proved to be successful. Behaviours, patterns that are inscribed in the analytics algorithms will be reinforced, while other patterns and parameters will be ignored.
- Next to that, it does not seem possible that analytics can capture all aspects of the environment
Thus, by relying too much on analytics, organizations risk becoming path dependent, ego-centric and bounded by their very own information producing devices.
