People-focused knowledge management

Action Space
Given an understanding of the situation, a person’s ability to make
decisions about how to handle it is guided by her Action Space and
Innovation Capability. The Action Space denotes the realm — the
“space” — within which the person is competent, willing, comfort-
able, or otherwise prepared to make decisions and act. The Action
Space is not a passive domain with fixed boundaries. It is formed by
curiosity and by the creative capabilities, methodologies and personal
attitudes, mentalities, and motivations that allow people to perform
regular tasks and consider novel actions and to innovate within the
boundaries of what they find permissible and acceptable. A person’s
Action Space is closely related to what she considers permissible
within her constraints. Consequently, much is reflected in her Gov-
ernance Competence and Perspectives with their goals, values, per-
missions, and constraints.
A competent person will understand the context of new and
slightly different situations and will readily initiate and pursue
options, innovating within his Action Space and Innovation Capa-
bility. However, he may be uncomfortable and unwilling to consider
actions outside this domain, which can sometimes prevent effective
behavior. On the other hand, an unwillingness to step outside the
action space can also prevent undesirable actions and in the aggre-
gate will render the enterprise behavior uniform and better organized.
Many enterprise management teams tend to limit their employees’
Action Spaces for precisely that reason.
For an undesirable example of a constrained Action Space, con-
sider Ian, an assembly worker who experienced consistent problems
when using parts supplied by another department. He thought that
the problems might lie with the parts themselves which did not fit
properly when they were incorporated into the assembly. As a result
of the reigning culture, Ian was not comfortable with diagnosing the
situation by himself. Hence, following accepted procedures, he
reported the issue to his supervisor, who then handled the issue “by
the book” by treating the problem in the proper channels. This
resulted in considerable delay and costly production upsets. This
episode was representative of many persistent problems within 
the plant.
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Later, as part of initiating new procedures with greater responsi-
bilities and freedom, Ian and his coworkers received additional 
education. They were given more complete contextual knowledge to
increase their competence, motivation, authority, and independence.
Ian and his colleagues in turn developed expanded Action Spaces and
Innovation Capabilities. Ian now feels comfortable about analyzing
and diagnosing similar situations and, when needed, contacts the
other departments directly without going through channels. That
fixes problems quickly and productively without delay and without
added supervisory overhead.
This is one example from a company that was plagued by pro-
duction delays and other operational problems. After analysis and
examination of best practices in other companies, assembly workers
and companion groups received additional training and were given
broader operating scope with greater responsibilities to alleviate
problems of this kind.
Unfortunately, personal and organizational constraints often 
cause better and more effective actions to fall outside the workers’
Situational Awareness and their Action Space and Innovation 
Capability. That hinders effective Sensemaking and Decision-
Making/Problem-Solving and impacts enterprise performance.
Similar constraints exist in the other capability areas and limit the
situation-handling effectiveness, thereby contributing to impaired
enterprise performance.