People-focused knowledge management

Situation
Facts-Objectives
Representation
of future
outcomes
Options for
decision
and
innovation
When Needed, New Situation-Specific
Mental Reference Models
Are Created by Conceptual Blending
Decision
Reasoning
Strategies
Adapted from Bechara 
et al.
, Science 28 Feb, 1997
Reference Model
Library
Personal Mental
Models of
Well known Cases
Covert activation of
biases related to 
previous emotional
[or meaningful]
experiences of
comparable
situations
Figure 3-3
Decision-Making often depends on experience with comparable situations. In
these cases, the dominant decision path bypasses explicit reasoning and proceeds
directly to imitate past, known situation-handling. Copyright © 1997 Knowledge
Research Institute, Inc. Reproduced with permission.
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Actions Are Initiated by Knowledgeable People
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experienced, memorized, or learned about. They use mental reference
models that in effect are tacit stories encoded at different levels of
abstraction to respond to familiar situations by imitating previous
behavior. That behavior might be a repetition of their own prior
actions when the mental reference models reflect their own experi-
ence, or it might be an imitation of someone else’s behavior when
they reflect recounted stories.
4
After a decision has been made, it will need to be implemented;
that is, translated into action. Typically, many small decisions and
actions are required to implement an observable and noticeable
action, such as completing authorization of a commercial loan after
the approval decision has been reached. All these small decisions also
require mental reference models for their execution.
5
Several issues have surfaced. One is the manner in which we 
intuitively rely on reference models to access and associate past ex-
periences, behaviors, and understandings for how we choose to act
in new situations. A major issue that occupies many researchers deals
with the question, “Do people have free will?” (Wegner 2002). The
question arises: “Are we indeed programmed to act in predestined
ways as a result of our past experiences?” Important as such ques-
tions may be from philosophical points of view, they may not be of
practical business interest and may fall outside our purview. Instead,
we postulate that, by choice, we can build personal knowledge in the
form of mental model libraries and other types of knowledge to suit