Mental and Structural Reference Models
113
to address a nonroutine target situation. We assume that the person
will use his general knowledge and will draw upon conceptual knowl-
edge in the form of mental models of generalized abstractions,
schemata, and scripts to create an operational model that is then acti-
vated to handle the situation.
For most complex situations, people will draw upon mental
models from many topic domains to incorporate different perspec-
tives that need to be blended to make a coherent picture. Decisions
of this kind are often based on expectations and the strength of asso-
ciations, rather than on a systematic decision-making process. Klein
(1998 and 2002) provides extensive discussion
on how people make
decisions in real situations. These findings, by themselves, have strong
implications for how we prepare people to continue learning and for
how we assist them to perform work more effectively. In particular,
we need to provide people with the kinds of knowledge that will facil-
itate their best performance — the highest degree of effective
intelligent-acting possible. However, as indicated previously, most
people have problems with dealing competently with making multi-
criteria decisions — particularly when there are uncertainties
involved, which always seems to be the case.
As an illustration of intuitive or
nonconscious decision making,
consider that I am driving my car on a winding mountain road,
another car passes me, and at the same time an oncoming car
appears. I am faced with a situation where I must address a complex
problem quickly. I must consider how people (in the other cars) are
likely to react under such circumstances; what may be physically pos-
sible given the speed of the cars; the road surface; the terrain on the
side of the road; the driving
characteristics of my own car; and my
own driving skills. Several generalized abstractions, schemata, and
scripts may be involved in my thinking within a time span of a second
or so. I may use metaknowledge (knowledge about what and how I
know) to decide how to handle the situation. I may retrieve a mental
model script from memory and use that as a basis for generating a
new, situation-specific script, with a resulting operational model used
to perform a mental simulation — if I have time before I need to act
— to ascertain that my potential
action will satisfice
3
the situation.
As indicated in Figure 4-3, mental simulation involves exploring if
the operational or action model will provide a satisficing solution by
using expectations and perspectives from internalized conceptual
knowledge. If the simulation results are unacceptable, the topic script
and its resulting action model are modified and the simulation is
repeated.
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114
People-Focused Knowledge Management
Organizational Reference Models
Management of any operation, be it a large enterprise or a small
team, is always difficult. Any such operation is a dynamic and con-
tinuously changing socioeconomic system with multiple objectives
and
tradeoffs, conflicts and shortages of time, attention, and other
resources. In addition, any operation and situation is connected to
multiple external entities. Within the enterprise, there are connections
to other departments and operations. Externally, there are connec-
tions to customers,
suppliers, owners, and other stakeholders. In this
“mess,” we still need to manage our operations to achieve the best
possible performance relative to all relevant objectives. It is impossi-
ble for even the best manager to arrive at decisions and approaches
from first principles and “scratch” to deal with the challenges.
Instead, operation and performance of enterprises to a large extent
depend on prior experience in the forms of structural reference
models to provide guidance for all kinds of challenges. They benefit
from utilizing reference models in a number of ways. Reference
models allow enterprises to repeat best practices that have proven
successful in the past, particularly when
they were also supported by,
and in concert with, management philosophy, operational practices,
and culture.
Some reference models that people share are culturally embedded
as stories or conventions that describe “this is the way we do it here.”
Others are included in the enterprise’s structural intellectual capital
in the form of practices, systems, procedures, enterprise policies,
and the manner in which the enterprise and its work processes are
organized.
In the enterprise, many structural reference
models perform func-
tions that are of crucial importance in that they provide the frame-
work for standard and uniform behavior that will result in
non-chaotic, orderly, and manageable operations. Examples of some
functions provided by organizational reference models include guid-
ance to
Outline expected and desired personal conduct (such as provid-
ing behavioral models for how to live the performance
paradigm).
Provide approaches to handle a wide variety of problem situa-
tions, many of which occur only rarely and therefore cannot be
expected to be well known by the people who are expected to
deal with the problem.
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Mental and Structural Reference Models
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Provide standardized approaches to handle routine business
problems.
In
numerous enterprises, many organizational reference models are
automated in computer-based performance support systems (PSS) or
other types of work aids. Some of these can include large libraries
with thousands of reference models and have extensive reasoning
capabilities to aid operations quickly and reliably.
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