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For our purposes, we believe that the memory location of mental
models and their characteristics are not important. In our context,
what is important is that, in addition to other mental constructs,
mental models are
present and vary in function, specificity, and depth
and are used as references for situation-handling and other mental
tasks. It is also important to know that we can help people build
libraries of mental reference models by learning on the job and
general education and by providing them with stories and anecdotes
— such as stories portraying the handling of concrete and specific
situations and stories illustrating general principles. The degree to
which general stories and case histories are memorized and internal-
ized is a direct function of how important or interesting they are to
the receiver. Dull events and stories that
illustrate the obvious are
not remembered well, although they may continue to reside un-
interpreted in episodic memory. Another approach to building tacit
mental models occurs through implicit learning as indicated in
Chapter 3.
There are competing theories for how people store, recall, and
reason with mental models and other knowledge. In this book, we
presume that people engage in a combination of model reasoning
and deductive-inductive-abductive reasoning.
1
We also adopt the
operational view that different and distinct short-term and long-term
memory functions serve specific and dedicated purposes. Given these
premises
and other insights, we consider the mental models that a
person possesses to be primarily tacit and represented in the mind in
different ways governed by the nature of both the situation being
modeled and the particular person’s memory and thinking style. For
example, the mental reference model for how to drive from one loca-
tion to another may include many scenes that are structurally
encoded as visual features combined with a script of where to turn
at specific times or scenes. For others, the mental model of the same
route may consist of street name anchored scripts.
Another example may be a set of mental reference models for how
to evaluate a commercial loan application. Such a situation includes
a number of individual concepts
such as creditworthiness, payment
history, and business outlook, each having separate reference models
for how to gather information and how to assess indicators/mea-
sures/attainments of the concepts, and so on. In addition, there will
be reference models for how to consolidate the individual dimensions
into a cohesive overall evaluation.
By being tacit, mental reference models reside in nonconscious
long-term memory and are recalled “on command” from working
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memory as part of the priming process.
As we discuss in the next
chapter, that may happen as part of sensemaking, when a person
receives, structures, and organizes information about a situation
before making sense of it. Her priming memory employs pattern
matching and metaphoric reasoning to cause past knowledge of
similar and relevant situations to be recalled from long-term memory,
typically in terms of mental reference models. In sensemaking, we
can think of these models as being part of the person’s situational
awareness capability. Much of our reasoning is qualitative and
probabilistic and is influenced by what
we know about the context
and by our values and biases. This, we believe, is the general mech-
anism by which relevant mental reference models are recalled and
utilized for the subtasks associated with this task. An illustration of
how we may envision some of the functional entities of the human
memory system is shown in Figure 4-2 and is explained further in
Appendix C.
Reference Models Are Stories!
Stories provide the basic structure and often the origin of mental
reference models. Social scientists have long understood the impor-
tance of stories, which have been the basis for transmitting cultural
insights in most societies. Recent cognitive
science insights into
decision making give direct indications that encoded stories have
direct relations to many types of mental models on the personal level.
There is also an emerging realization that stories play important roles
in capturing, retaining, and utilizing operational and theoretical
knowledge in business. The importance, roles, and nature of stories
in business have recently been treated by Denning (2000), Kotter and
Cohen (2002), Ready (2002), Snowden (2000), and Wright (2000).
This realization has significance for many aspects of KM — such as
which methods are effective for sharing knowledge within commu-
nities of practice, how one should acquire and institutionalize per-
sonal knowledge into structural intellectual capital (IC), how
effective
education should be performed, and what is needed to
conduct knowledge diagnostics effectively.
Mental reference models are typically represented by encoded pro-
cedural or cause-and-effect constructs from stories that have been
distilled to extract salient relationships, features, and patterns. These
characteristics are combined in our minds and are remembered,
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People-Focused Knowledge Management
perhaps as a unit, or more likely in ways that we might represent by
chunked hierarchies or semantic nets.
Most people seem to find it easier to remember complicated rela-
tionships and conditions when they are presented,
integrated, and
structured in the form of stories. The stories provide both a context
and a framework. It is more difficult to remember isolated knowl-
edge items such as principles or rules. As a result, it is more likely
that people remember personal experiences as static events or as
evolving situations — as stories.
Visuo-Spatial
Central
Executive
Sensory
System
Nonconscious
Working Memories
Long-Term
Memory
Procedural
Memory
Episodic
Memory
Semantic
Memory
Lexical
Encyclopedic
Priming
Memory
Buffer
Memory
Motor
System
Conceptual
Memory
Conscious
Working Memory
Visuo-Spatial
Central
Executive
Articulatory
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