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and Operating
Practices Which
Do Not Support
People’s
Capabilities and
Natural Behaviors
Stress Impairs Retrieval
from Long-Term Memory
People Tend to Pursue
Role Model Behaviors
Complex Work Requires
More Knowledge than a Single
Person Normally Possesses
Information and
Knowledge Are
Fundamentally Different
Figure 3-1
Seven areas of knowledge-related misconceptions that make workers less
effective than we should accept. Copyright © 2002 Karl M. Wiig.
Reproduced with permission.
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Actions Are Initiated by Knowledgeable People
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Thinking, Reasoning, and Knowledge
Most people think of knowledge as a recipe — a defined procedure
— for dealing with a concrete, well-defined situation. However, few
situations are repeated; in their minute detail most situations are
novel and need to be treated as such. Hence, knowledge needs to
provide us with the capability — the understanding — that permits
us to envision and operationalize possible ways of handling different
situations and to judge and anticipate implications. Knowledge
allows us to innovate, improvise, and adjust decisions and actions
needed to serve each individual context while optimizing personal
and enterprise goals and objectives. Our knowledge — such as
scripts, schemata, and mental reference models — and mental capa-
bilities provide us with the capability to work with a variety of situ-
ations. By utilizing conceptual blending, we generate new knowledge
that takes us far beyond concepts and predefined methods and judg-
ments, and allows us to create new concepts, metaconcepts, and
mental models that often constitute innovative and novel situation-
specific approaches.
Thinking takes many forms and serves many purposes. We think
when we learn, when we generalize, when we retrieve memories,
when we analyze and categorize, search for patterns, try to see sim-
ilarities, identify associations, try to find additional instances, detect
inconsistencies, reason consciously, decide what to do, handle situa-
tions and in many other endeavors. Gilhooly (1988, p. 1) explains
that thinking involves:
a set of processes whereby people assemble, use, and revise
mental models. For example, thinking directed toward solving a
problem may be regarded as exploring a mental model of the
task to determine the course of action that should be the best
(or at least satisfactory). A mental model often enables the
thinker to go far beyond the perceptually available information
and to anticipate outcomes of alternative actions without costly
overt trial and error.
Gilhooly also suggests that “thinking is always occurring during
periods of wakefulness, albeit often in a free-floating daydreaming
fashion.” Recent research, however, shows that much tacit thinking
is also performed when we sleep and dream. We may actually even
need sleep to organize and make sense of new knowledge and per-
spectives that we have obtained when awake.
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People-Focused Knowledge Management
Most important intellectual functions are tacit, unobservable, and
take place when we dream and during other periods such as rapid
eye movement (REM) sleep. As indicated, most of our think-
ing involves tacit reasoning. When we draw associations, try to
remember, or assess outcomes from complex situations, we mostly
perform these tasks nonconsciously. When knowledge workers mull
over some conceptual material in their minds or when they internal-
ize and organize newly acquired knowledge to build congruent
understanding of their expertise and expand their associations, they
may even appear to daydream or be totally inactive. Some managers
have frowned on such behavior, considering these activities to be ille-
gitimate and undesirable since they are not visibly involved in gen-
erating work products. Yet, these activities are absolutely necessary
for the knowledge workers to solve hard problems, innovate, or inter-
nalize newly acquired knowledge to grow and develop, and thereby
increase the organization’s knowledge assets as well as their own.
An important type of thinking is explicit reasoning. It is of specific
interest in the context of KM because it leads to conscious conclu-
sions as part of decisions and other recognizable work products
where the reasoning process can be inspected and verified. Other
modes of thinking, however, may be more important because they
are central both to knowledge creation and organization and to auto-
matic or tacit knowledge work. We reason when we analyze a situ-
ation and when we arrive at conclusions, and that, typically, is the
analysis result we are seeking. Johnson-Laird proposes that for the
most part people reason without using “mental logic and formal rules
of inference” (Johnson-Laird 1983). Instead, we reason with pro-
positions, associations, and mental models embedded in our under-
standing of our natural language or other modes of reasoning. This
may imply that much, if not most, of our reasoning is nonconscious
and directed by immediate understanding, associative reasoning,
pattern recognition, and other types of reasoning. A newer insight
into these processes is explained by conceptual blending (Fauconnier
& Turner 2002).
Our thinking processes and reasoning approaches are complex and
governed by the knowledge we possess, our life’s experiences, and
the way our brains are organized and wired
3
, by our individual
aptitudes, cognitive styles, and dominant memory styles. Thinking is
performed in different ways, using many mechanisms. When we mull
over a particular situation, our thinking involves retrieval of episodes,
specifics, and concepts that relate directly to or are associated with
the situation. Our thinking process may also retrieve and examine
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Actions Are Initiated by Knowledgeable People
71
more detailed and more abstract or aggregated concepts ( chunked
concepts; see Glossary) that relate to the central concepts.
Furthermore, it may trigger issues (assisted by priming; see Glossary)
that remind us, and permit retrieval, of relevant long-term memory
items. And when we mull over something, our thinking will also rely
on some of the reasoning strategies that are second nature for us.
One aspect of KM deals with teaching new and more powerful
reasoning strategies, such as critical thinking, in such ways that they
become natural and automatic choices when it is appropriate to apply
them.
When we read or listen to someone speak, we constantly think;
that is, we process the incoming information stream both non-
consciously and explicitly in working memories. This process is part
of making sense of the information. A simplified example of this
process is illustrated in Figure 3-2 for determining the meaning of the
statement: “The sailboat sailed away” after we have first automati-
cally parsed the sentence structure and verified that it is acceptable
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