People-focused knowledge management

Required
Knowledge
Can Be
ted
(Some
Automated)
Some Abstract
Knowledge
Is Needed
Workers Need
Additional
Knowledge
Considerable
New Knowledge
Is Required
Potentials for
Delivering Work
Requiring
Greater Knowledge
Frequency of
Occurrences
1. Routine
(simple,
repetitive, and
well
understood)
2. Logical or less
common
variations
(transformations)
of 
routine situations
3. Complex, yet
expected
extensions of
routines
integrated with
external factors
4. Unexpected
challenges
(conditions),
but with a mix
of routines and
external factors
5. Totally
unexpected
situations and
non-routine
challenges,
yet within the
larger job scope 
6. Unusual
challenges
outside
job scope
Complexity
of Work
Past
work
Future
work
candidates
for
Intelligent
Automation
Required
Metaknowledge
Available T
opic Knowledge
Figure 3-13
Topic knowledge has greater applicability in routine work, while metaknowledge is more important when
work is complex. Copyright © 1998 by Karl M. Wiig. Reproduced with permission.

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96
People-Focused Knowledge Management
mystery that managers may ask to “just keep it simple, stupid!” (the
so-called KISS principle) and why monetary measures often become
the only criterion for selecting the desired action.
Examples of Approaches to Develop Mental 
Models in People
Many important approaches are available for helping people build
work-related libraries of mental models. Following are examples that
pertain to building mental models for domain topic content and
methodological strategies at abstraction levels ranging from concrete
to script to schema to metaknowledge.
Knowledge Sharing by Storytelling has always been part of 
individual and societal transfer and sharing of concepts, princi-
ples, judgments, beliefs, traditions, and other insights. Stories
are also used to communicate operational and methodological
knowledge. Industry and business storytelling is part of 
everyday knowledge sharing among collaborators, communities 
of practice, and most other parties. Whereas the stories them-
selves may be explicit and part of structural IC assets, effective
storytelling allows listeners to internalize messages and build
personal mental models of value for future considerations and
actions.
7
Business Simulations are increasingly used by business schools
to teach graduate students models and implications of organi-
zation management. They are also important tools to assist man-
agers, supervisors, and line personnel gain insights into how to
handle various business situations that they may encounter.
Business operations at every level are challenging and always
raise a question of exercising critical thinking and integrative
skills and making well-judged tradeoffs between multiple objec-
tives. Everybody recognizes these requirements for senior 
management. However, to a surprising extent, these require-
ments are also for assembly workers, cafeteria personnel, and
the company’s sanitation people.
Developing the mental models needed for integrative and
objectives tradeoff considerations and actions is considered 
difficult and low priority and is often neglected, with the result
that workers — particularly at the lower levels of the enterprise
— are often ineffective. Whereas people may know the details,
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Actions Are Initiated by Knowledgeable People
97
they lack the integrating mental models. We find that targeted
and simple business and operations simulations and games
prove to be ideal learning environments to remedy these 
problems.