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that require interventions or lead to other actions, including internal
adaptation or problem avoidance such as outright flight.
The General Context
We assume that work and most other endeavors generally consist
of a process whereby a person receives information about a situa-
tion, identifies what it is about and how it
will evolve relative to what
is desired, finds ways to deal with it to bring the situation closer to
desired objectives, and ascertains that it is done satisfactorily. In most
cases, however, the situation is ongoing and is subject to repeated or
continuous information gathering: Sensemaking, Decision-Making,
and Implementation of actions. When dealing with situations in
which people make decisions that result in actions, we say that they
engage in
situation-handling. In all areas of life, situation-handling
is important. During a normal workday,
people engage in hundreds
or even thousands of small, individual situation-handling episodes.
Most such episodes are personal, nonconscious (tacit), and auto-
matic and require a few seconds, others require more work, and still
others require extensive teamwork and collaboration and can have
long durations. Clearly, in order to achieve high-grade enterprise
performance, these individual personal situation-handling episodes
must be as effective as possible. Separately, they must be effective,
and in the aggregate they still must be effective. The latter require-
ment immediately brings to the fore the
need for appropriate enter-
prise practices as well as organization systems and procedures that
promote and take advantage of the effective consolidation of good
individual actions, as discussed in the next chapter.
From a KM perspective, understanding of personal and organi-
zational situation-handling, including Decision-Making/Problem-
Solving, is important to manage knowledge successfully. This
understanding requires insights into areas as diverse as situation-
handling practices, cognitive sciences, knowledge transfer methods,
microeconomics, management principles, and supporting informa-
tion technology. Such insights are required to diagnose knowledge-
related operations that will help determine
drivers and conditions,
conceptualize KM initiatives, implement capabilities, and assess and
monitor utilization of knowledge-related resources and practices.
Frequently, acquiring the requisite understanding of knowledge-
related mechanisms on the personal and organizational level
takes KM professionals into new fields and requires them to view
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work and operations from perspectives that may be new to most
of them.
What constitutes a
situation, however, is far from clear, particu-
larly when it is incipient with an almost undetectable start or evolves
over time as most situations tend to do (Stafford 2002). It may be
difficult to identify the beginning of a
situation or even determine
when it has ended. Most situations are quite dynamic and fluid and
can change substantially over time as results of internal dynamics or
external actions. Other situations may consist of a single occurrence.
Still others may comprise a sequence of events separated in time, such
as when an insurance underwriter is working a case in small time
chunks whenever new information arrives, until a final action is
implemented. Or a situation may consist of a condition that changes
dynamically over time and is handled repeatedly until no more atten-
tion is required — such as driving a car from home to work (Garvin
& Roberto 2001). For example, medical situations may follow such
a pattern when a physician diagnoses a patient, who subsequently
receives a series of treatments to gradually become better. Many
other,
often complex, business situations also follow this pattern.
Other examples include handling prolonged negotiations of labor
contracts, research and development to create a new manufacturing
process, or the process of developing a customer relationship in the
commercial loan business.
Within the enterprise, business functions consist of interconnected
dynamic systems or processes of many types that are similar in nature
to other processes within the world in general. Most processes can
be manipulated or influenced by external action; some, when tightly
organized, can be made to follow intended patterns in general and
then can even be controlled to some extent. Examples are oppres-
sively controlled dictatorships. However, in business,
the dynamic
behavior of individuals, departments, and the enterprise itself will
generate changing conditions — situations and events — that directly
or indirectly affect finances, products, services, people, departments,
enterprises, customers, other stakeholders, and so on. Thus, these
behaviors may require attention to make their performance accept-
able. These situations need to be managed by initiating interventions
— actions — to change or manipulate
them to modify their behav-
iors and outcomes. They can be handled to fulfill personal or enter-
prise goals and objectives.
A person handles situations by identifying what they are about,
by making decisions about what to do with them, by implementing
the decisions — the selected actions — and by monitoring what is
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happening, explicitly or implicitly. As situations evolve, Sensemaking
will be repeated, and new action-options will be developed and exe-
cuted — at times before implementation of prior actions is completed
or their final effects are known. The handling of these situations
becomes an exercise in “steering” very complicated and dynamic
problems, often with insufficient information and understanding.
Nevertheless, such situations must be handled. They often can be
handled better with improved understanding
of the situation-han-
dling process, which provides insights into which situation-handling
tasks may be improved with the available knowledge, information,
and resources.
As discussed further in the next section, situations that involve
regular work can vary considerably from simple routine to highly
complex.
We argue that more complex work generally is of greater
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