People-focused knowledge management

New
Information
New
Information
New
Information
Actions
to Change
Situation
Guldance &
Corrective
Adjustment
Guidance &
Corrective
Adjustment
Monitoring
Execution
Capability
Figure 5-3
The personal Situation-Handling model becomes more complicated with
additional tasks in an ongoing situation. Copyright © 2002 Knowledge Research
Institute, Inc. Reproduced with permission.
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People-Focused Knowledge Management
reference models, which are part of her Action Space and Innovation
Capability, and she makes the decision automatically and rapidly,
within about 6 seconds — even though she needs to engage in “multi-
stage Decision-Making.”
2
As part of the Decision-Making task, she performs mental simula-
tions guided by Monitoring and her mental Governing Approach ref-
erence models (see the following section on topic domain knowledge).
It is this process that led her to reject the first two action-options
because they satisfied neither her company’s intents nor her own 
criteria for how to treat clients. She implements her decision routinely
by being highly familiar with corporate practices, systems, and pro-
cedures and by having good networking contacts with the people in
manufacturing. Part of this knowledge she possesses as Execution
Method reference models included in her Execution Capability.
Throughout, the manner in which Susan performs her Sensemak-
ing, Decision-Making/Problem-Solving, and Implementation tasks is
supervised by her Monitoring task and her Governance Competence
and Perspectives functional proficiency — particularly her mental
Governance Approach reference models. This executive function
operates in the background — mostly nonconsciously and automat-
ically — and provides objectives and guidance to influence the way
she interprets information, makes decisions, chooses action-options,
and implements the desired actions. As a result, her overall situation-
handling supported the enterprise intent for how to deal with impor-
tant customers. The corporate situation-handling is rapid, routine,
and flexible, and falls in line with implementing the enterprise strat-
egy and also satisfies Susan’s own professional values.
The Four Situation-Handling Tasks
The four primary situation-handling tasks work together to com-
prise an integrated system with operations that are partly sequential
and partly executed in parallel. For personal situation-handling, 
the operations are normally executed tacitly within a person’s mind.
Within an organization, the operations may be executed explicitly 
by a person, different individuals, teams, departments, or even highly
automated systems such as an automatic credit checking system for
credit cards. The operations progress from initial observation of the
situation and its context to execution of the selected action — or
actions — intended to change the situation outcome to best fulfill the
context and situation objectives.
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A Knowledge Model for Personal Situation-Handling
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The degree to which situation-handling provides a valid treatment
of the target situation is influenced by numerous factors. Many of
these factors can in turn be influenced to improve sensemaking 
performance in specific situations or in general. Tables 5-1 and 5-3
to 5-5 provide examples of positive and negative conditions that
affect the primary tasks of situation-handling.