People-focused knowledge management

Declarative metaknowledge is about having tacit declarative
understanding of what is known — know-what.
— Example: Tacit awareness of aspects such as personal or
enterprise capabilities to perform the hiring process compe-
tently. This would include which hiring expertise “I” have
and which hiring expertise my coworkers have.
Metacognition
On the highest abstraction level, metaknowledge consists of
metacognition; that is, the capability to reason with mostly tacit high-
level mental models to “regulate” — or provide evaluation, planning,
strategy and methodological and monitoring guidance for — regular
(“first order”) cognition, be it tacit or explicit.
Metacognition can be divided into the following (Kuhn 2000):
Metastrategic knowing provides strategies such as method-
ologies and perspectives to address the task goals provided by
metatask knowing.
— Example: General approaches and points of view for how
to achieve the criteria and expectations for the hiring task.
Metatask knowing provides particulars — objectives, expecta-
tions, perspectives — for goals for target situations and tasks.
— Example: Knowing what constitutes a “good” employee, a
desirable candidate, an equitable match between a candi-
date’s expertise and the needs of the enterprise, and a well-
executed hiring process.
Metacognitive knowing is metaknowledge about declarative
knowing.
— Example: Having a tacit understanding of how good, com-
plete, and appropriate the declarative metaknowledge for
hiring is.
Memory and Knowledge Categorizations
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Notes
1. A thorough discussion of the brain’s organization can be found in Posner
(1989), Chapter 8.
2. George A. Miller (1956) reported the capacity of working memory in his
famous study, “The magical number seven, plus or minus two.”
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LOSSARY