People-focused knowledge management

Decision-Making/Problem-Solving and Action Space and
Innovation Capability
Decision-Making
Decision-Making — the identification and specification of what to
do given a situation and its context — is one of the most important
activities in which people can engage. Many researchers have con-
tributed to this field over the years. However, only recently have 
the roles of knowledge and expertise in Decision-Making become
better understood and more explicit as a result of work in cognitive
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People-Focused Knowledge Management
sciences, psychology, knowledge management, and related fields.
Decision-Making, as we perceive it, covers three functional task
paths: (1) simple decision making, (2) complex decision making, and
(3) novel problem solving.
When the situation is first understood, it is possible to determine
how it should be handled. Well understood situations can be handled
directly with single-stage Decision-Making. This mode may at times
involve the quick mental simulations to evaluate potential alter-
natives. Well understood situations can be handled directly with
single-stage Decision-Making. More complex situations will need
multistage complex Decision-Making or even novel Problem-Solving.
Multistage Decision-Making/Problem-Solving typically requires iter-
ative handling, with additional information gathering and sense-
making. Decision-Making theories and practices have been treated
extensively by others and should be consulted by the interested reader
in works by Bechara et al. (1997), Glimcher (2003), Hammon et al.
(1999), Janis (1989), Janis and Mann (1977), Keeney and Raiffa
(1976), Klein (1998, 2002), Simon (1976, 1977a), Sowell (1980), and
Wiig (1993).
Most situations that people encounter during the workday are
familiar to them and handled with tacit single-stage Decision-Making.
In these cases people have prior understanding which they possess in
their minds as task-specific mental templates or reference models that
they operationalize to arrive at action-options that they can carry out.
They may often be unaware that they make these decisions.
To make these tacit decisions, people use approaches such as 
qualitative or fuzzy pattern recognition and metaphoric reasoning 
to locate and apply the mental reference models and other mental
objects that are most similar to the situation at hand. For well-known
situations, the mental models are likely to describe routine and con-
crete tasks and may be activated by direct execution. Less known sit-
uations will not correspond directly to past experiences, and mental
models — when any exist — may be possessed at higher abstraction
levels as scripts, schemata, or metaknowledge. In these cases, which
are the norm for intellectual work, the new situations are handled
and decisions are made. Actions are implemented by adapting and
operationalizing the reference models that most closely resemble the
new conditions or can be expected to lead to useful approaches to
the target situation. The resulting operational models are then acti-
vated to perform the intended actions. Adaptation and operational-
ization are often tacit when a person works alone. Only for more
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A Knowledge Model for Personal Situation-Handling
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vexing and high importance situations may the process become
explicit and conscious, particularly when engaging in teamwork and
collaboration. These steps often require conceptual blending and may
lead to creative innovation and valuable solutions. For a person with
narrow and mostly concrete and detailed knowledge, innovative
adaptation is difficult. Curious people with broad knowledge, under-
standing of general principles, and open minds with flexible Action
Spaces are often able to innovate better. The conceptual blending
involved in adaptation and operationalization often is a creative
process that leads to novel and innovative solutions. This, we argue,
is an important form of innovation and creativity.
We can illustrate four levels of situation understanding with cor-
responding Decision-Making/Problem-Solving modes as indicated in
Table 5-2. When novel or less known situations are encountered, they
may need to be handled differently, as indicated in Figures 5-4 and
5-5. Conditions that affect Decision-Making/Problem-Solving effec-
tiveness are shown in Table 5-3.