People-focused knowledge management

Figure 4-2
Conceptual model of the human memory system. Copyright © 1993 by Karl M.
Wiig. Reproduced with permission.
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Mental and Structural Reference Models
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For the most part, people cannot recall all the stories in their
memory on demand. Most stories are tacit and normally unavailable
to conscious thought. However, given a particular situation, priming
memory brings relevant stories to bear, either as conscious thought
or as tacit patterns used to guide automatic actions. We use pattern
recognition and other reasoning strategies to recall memories that
resemble the situations at hand. In this way, as is discussed in the
next chapter, people use mentally encoded stories automatically and
nonconsciously to handle situations as part of their Situational
Awareness, Action Space and Innovation, Execution Capability, and
Governance Competence.
Why Are Stories Important?
Stories come in many forms. They may be verbal tales of events
that have happened and may be presented linearly in time. They may
be descriptions of separate actors and entities and their relations to
one another. Some stories may never be verbalized. They may be tacit,
as when a master shows an apprentice how to perform a particular
task without explaining anything. Stories may be drawings of
mechanical designs or diagrams of computer programs. They may be
pictures, even artworks such as paintings of medieval boar hunts or
an Australian aborigine’s illustration of the importance and propa-
gation of knowledge within his society. Stories do not require depic-
tion of dynamic evolution, although many imply or make explicit
progression over time. Most stories illustrate causal chains: “This is
what was done and that is what happened,” often with associated
explanations of why the consequence happened. Other stories may
be static descriptions of situations, such as an illustration of the posi-
tions of opposing forces on a battlefield or a description of the current
state of an ecological system. In all cases, stories describe, and by
their descriptions they provide categorizations, structure, and frame-
works that, when believed and internalized by recipients, allow the
building of understanding and mental models.