Roll for initiative!

I was having some difficulty deciding which articles to read for this post, so I decided to grab a D20 die and roll for it.  (I may be a bit too excited about planning a new D&D campaign once the semester is over.)  The results were honestly better than I suspected they would be!

The first article that random chance decided for me was Kumar and Chakrabarti’s 2012 piece on the Challenger disaster.  Before anything, they did an excellent job at defining a concept they were looking at in this case study: bounded awareness.  This is essentially when individuals making decision overlook available, and often obvious, information, leading either to a less-than-preferred decision or to something more catastrophic.  Through an examination of the Challenger disaster, they examine the following:

Managers’ dependence upon their existing tacit knowledge and the bounds on their awareness influence each other in a cycle of positive reinforcement. Building on this realization, [the authors] then highlight the path dependent nature of the evolution of tacit knowledge to argue that different decision makers in the organization can experience differing bounds on their
awareness towards the same piece of information. Finally, [the authors] supplement all this by arguing that the past history of success and/or failure experienced by the organization and its individuals also play an important role in the relationship between the two constructs. (Kumar & Chakrabarti, 2012, p. 935)

NASA’s decision to launch despite information indicating that this was not the best course of action was concluded to not be a case of “in-spite-of” but “because of” tacit knowledge.  Their previous knowledge and experience caused them to overlook important information, therefore bounding their knowledge, and making the wrong decision.  The authors also imply that past experience likely made the available information appear “trivial” (p. 943).  The following figure is their model for this cycle of “positive reinforcement”.

Kumar and Chakrbarti admit that their analysis does not provide solutions for breaking this cycle, only “how such a cycle can come into existence and then amplify” (p. 945).

This is where my lucky new D20 came in handy again.

Normally, rolling a 2 would leave me pretty bummed out, but I’ve read several other blogs by classmates that have mentioned the Chua (2007) discussion of hurricanes Katrina and Rita as case studies for knowledge management, so I was alright with it this time.  Chua used a variety of accounts about preparation and response to these disasters in order to get a clear picture of the knowledge management in both situations.  They looked at many different parts of the disaster management process such as disaster prediction, implementation of disaster plans, evacuations, and cooperation across agencies.  One conclusion they drew from their analysis was that there was a difference in knowledge creation between the two events.  During Katrina, there was a lot of “knowing”, but not much “doing”.  The response to Rita bridged that cognitive gap, illustrating the following:

Knowledge creation is not merely a social process usually presented in the mainstream KM literature, but is strongly laden with political overtones where forces of restoring goodwill and managing expectations are at play. (Chua, 2007, p. 1526)

Chua also determined that past mistakes were more likely to be “consciously avoided” than those in the more distant past.  They also discuss the importance of knowledge transfer which requires active parties to trust and reciprocate in sharing information.  Some of these conclusions offer insight into breaking the cycle of positive reinforcement that Kumar and Chakrabarti discuss, largely from a political point of view.  Similar to the fighting of authority figures in the wake of the hurricanes, NASA management caved to pressure to launch and ignored vital information.  Chua writes that knowledge should be “consciously categorized” and “compiled” (p. 1527).  While the case study about the hurricanes is in the wake of a disaster compared to the Challenger study focusing on pre-disaster, the emphasis is to focus on the information above authority squabbles or political motivations.  One of Emily‘s posts has a great take on ego within organizational decisions that I kept drawing on as I read these two case studies.

The D20 had already led me in the direction of two case studies that implied conscious effort to focus on the available information is necessary for success.  By this point, I was hoping for a more concrete solution, something beyond the obvious: “Don’t ignore available information!  Leave your ego at home when dealing with risky situations like this!”  When I tossed the die one more time, I was hoping for something that would provide a more structured or specific solution to the problems of bounded awareness.  Lucky number 13 didn’t fail me.

Lam and Chua (2009) address knowledge outsourcing – KO – as an alternative strategy for knowledge management.  Using (another!) case study, they took a look at KO in a for-profit education enterprise.  They concluded that, through the use of KO, organizations are “able to gain access to a pool of… expertise on a flexible basis” (p. 39).   While a good portion of this article emphasized the financial benefits of KO, one of their figures caught my eye:

The cyclical portion of this model is what did it for me.  The monitoring of knowledge, which I believe could be extended to evaluation of knowledge and information, is a vital piece of this KO process.  I imagine applying this outsourcing of knowledge in higher risk situations than an educational organization.  It could be used as a way of implementing checks and balances in decision making.  Sometimes gaining a fresh pair of eyes can help in making realizations or recognizing mistakes.

Thanks, D20.  This was an interesting journey of connecting some dots and trying to apply different concepts to situations that I would not normally think to do.  At the very least, an interesting thought experiment.

Finals week must be hitting me hard if I’m personifying a die.

 

1. Chua, A. Y. K. (2007). A tale of two hurricanes: Comparing Katrina and Rita through a knowledge management perspective. Journal of the American Society of Information Science and Technology, 58(10), 1518-1528. doi:10.1002/asi.20640
2. Kumar J, A., & Chakrabarti, A. (2012). Bounded awareness and tacit knowledge:  Revisiting Challenger disaster. Journal of Knowledge Management, 16(6), 934-949. doi:10.1108/13673271211276209
3. Lam, W., & Chua, A. Y. (2009). Knowledge outsourcing: An alternative strategy for knowledge management. Journal of Knowledge Management, 13(3), 28-43.
   doi:10.1108/13673270910962851.