People-focused knowledge management

Most people remember concepts and “stories” easier than they
remember “facts.” Businesses and educational institutions often
prepare people by providing theoretical education and training
that emphasize facts, details, and relatively mechanistic and con-
crete aspects of “this is how you do it” and “these are the facts.”
General understanding and underlying rationales are not 
provided as often as needed: the focus is on telling “how” and
“what,” not on “why.” The ability to perform under nonstan-
dard conditions and deal competently with complex work relies
mostly on utilizing mental models at different levels of abstrac-
tion rather than on piecing together new approaches from basic
principles and facts. Education that provides integration of
many aspects of practical situations through hands-on and 
laboratory work, or even storytelling, alleviates this problem 
to some extent.
2
As work becomes more complex (as was illus-
trated in Figure 1-2), relevant stories may be encoded as mental
models and provide procedural metaknowledge and generic
abstractions as will be explained.
Decisions are nonconscious to a larger extent than we realized
earlier. When possible, people attempt to make decisions by
repeating previous experiences — by doing what they know how
to do and what appears most natural to them. The majority of
daily decisions are based on utilizing tacit mental models to
handle situations by “covert activation of biases related to 
previous emotional experiences of comparable situations.”
(Bechara et al., 1997). A large aspect of competence relies on
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Actions Are Initiated by Knowledgeable People
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this behavior and requires extensive, well-developed libraries of
mental reference models.