What is True?: Looking at the Validity of Shared Knowledge



By Nancy M. Dixon

Nancy M. Dixon is professor, Administrative Sciences at The George Washington University and author of Common Knowledge: How Organizations Thrive By Sharing What They Know. She can be reached at nancydixon@commonknowledge.org.

How Do Employers Manage Local Knowledge for Organizational Advantage?

More and more today, I find employees seeking the knowledge they need to do their jobs from their peers. They may locate a "best practice" in the company database, or ask a question of an on-line network. New knowledge may result from a conversation with a colleague who is just down the hall, or from a phone call made to a contact who is halfway around the world. Organizations are encouraging this kind of knowledge sharing, even insisting upon it. Knowledge exchanges like these reveal a new appreciation for the knowledge that employees gain simply by doing their work, or what I call "local knowledge." Today's employers increasingly regard this local knowledge as a valuable asset, and are trying to figure out ways to manage it for organizational advantage.

I have studied how employees share the local knowledge they develop, and documented the many ways this happens in my book, Common Knowledge. What also interests me, however, is how employees determine if this borrowed local knowledge is valid, i.e., how they make the decision to apply what someone else learned from experience to their own situations. It is an important issue, in my view, because we are now in the middle of a change in how we think about the validity of knowledge within our organizations.

When knowledge comes to us through the organizational hierarchy, the question of validity is somewhat less worrisome than when it comes directly from a peer. For example, when a manager gets a memo from the head office saying that managers need to function more like coaches, accompanied with a list of actions to be taken in order to accomplish that directive, there is some tacit assurance that the knowledge contained in that memo is valid. Or an engineer gets a note from the corporate technology group that says, "Here are the standards and tolerances to be used on the FCC unit - implement them immediately so you can improve your yield." While we, as employees, may not agree with the knowledgeor find it particularly helpfulwe are nevertheless freed from having to make a decision about its validity. The organization's "stamp of approval" handles that for us.

It can be a very different story, however, with the knowledge that employees obtain from their organizational peers. For example, an economist might receive an email from a colleague describing a better way to model the factors that influence costs and benefits in business development decisions. Although this colleague encourages the economist to employ the new model, the latter already uses a different model. Who is to say that this new approach is better? Or consider an engineer who, when visiting a sister plant, notices that the plant is using a very different process to repair converters than the one used at her plant. How is our engineer to know if this alternative process is more effective?

With technology and products changing rapidly in nearly every industry today, it is unlikely that either the engineer or the economist will be able to run every idea up the organizational ladder to see what the top-level experts think about them. And even if there was time, the people at top don't know about the all kinks in the machines that the engineer faces or which cost/benefit arguments will be most persuasive to the economist's management team. It is the engineer and the economist who have that knowledge, so it is they who will have to judge the worth of the knowledge they are receiving.

Of course, this phenomenon is not dissimilar from what happens when I search the Internet for information. If, for example, I look for information on "how to handle a lingering cough," I will receive a host of answers, through which I will need to sort for what is useful. Yet I have little concern that most of the responses are pure drivel! On the Web, there is no official source for determining validity. Anyone can write up and post their "knowledge." Still, I feel reasonably capable of determining what is and is not useful to me. But how am I making those decisions? More importantly, how do the borrowers of organizational knowledge make decisions about the validity of what they learn from their peers? As I look at what is taking place in organizations today, I see borrowers relying on three primary criteria: fit, experience, and relationship. Let's take a closer look at each of them.

Fit

Fit is probably the most frequent criterion that knowledge borrowers apply. They ask themselves, "Is what the other person is offering a match for my situation?" As observers we sometimes disparage this criterion by labeling it "not invented here," and view it as just an excuse for the borrower not to try the new idea. But more often that not, the question of fit is a legitimate one. After all, the knowledge that we borrow from another part of the organization is not generalized knowledge. Instead, it is developed locally, out of someone's experience, making it specific to that situation by definition. What worked in one situation may not, in fact, work in another. The person who is best positioned to make that decision is the person who functions day in and day out in the new situation.

If, as I suggested earlier, local knowledge is growing in importance to organizations, then this trend will require firms to also value their employees' abilities to make their own choices about the usefulness and applicability of knowledge to their situations. In a sense, the usefulness of local knowledge and the ability to judge the usefulness of that knowledge for the local situation are two sides of the same coin. And this ability to determine usefulness is a critical part of the exercise of judgment for which engineers, economists, and a wide variety of other "knowledge workers" are compensated by today's organizations.

Experience

A second criterion that organizational knowledge borrowers use is the level and extent of experience attributed to the knowledge source. I came to understand the importance of this factor firsthand during a company list serve discussion about a technical issue in which both engineers and operators were asking and answering each other's questions. Typically, the name and affiliation of each contributor appeared as part of the message. But due to a technical challenge, a few messages were sent out in which the person responding was identified only by a series of numbers. Several participants voiced the concern that they could not determine the sender's level of experience, leaving them without the necessary data to apply the "level of experience" test to help determine the answers' validity.

Returning for a moment to my Internet analogy, we can observe the many chat rooms where people who have shared an experience, such as drug addiction, cancer, or the loss of a child, can learn with and from each other. It is their personal experience that makes their knowledge useful and acceptable to others in the community. The real value to others is not "expert" knowledge from doctors, but the practical knowledge created from the experience of living through very difficult times.

Using the level of experience of the source as a way to determine the validity or his or her knowledge makes sense when the knowledge being shared was developed experience.

Relationship

Finally, knowledge borrowers judge validity on the basis of their relationship to the source of local knowledge. It is quite natural that we tend to trust what we learn from people we have met more than the knowledge of those who are unknown to us. We are more likely to call someone we know (or even someone who knows someone we know) over a random name located in the company yellow pages. Once we make the call, we are more likely to see their knowledge as valid if we have a previous relationship with that person. The motto, "Never accept knowledge from a stranger" is lived out each day in the world of organizational knowledge sharing.

When organizations support and encourage communities of practice (CoP) for knowledge sharing, it is this relationship criterion on which they are focused. There is a growing understanding that if people are to trust each other's knowledge, they must first know each other.

Expanding the criteria for validity

The three factors of fit, experience, and relationship may not be the criteria we would expect employees to use in making decisions about whether to adopt local knowledge. Instead, we might predict that such decisions would be based on data, expert opinion, or scientific evidence. But these are the criteria of the impersonal world of science, the realm of empirical data. The knowledge considered in this article is gained from practical, local experience. When we share knowledge learned in this way we are, in effect, sharing a part of ourselves. Such knowledge is anything but impersonal. I don't want to go so far as to say these three criteria of fit, experience and relationship replace the harder criteria of data, expert opinion and scientific evidence, but in this new knowledge economy, perhaps they are given greater weight, and have, quite appropriately, moved up in prominence.