Five conditions of the knowledge spiral process at the epistemological dimension

The five conditions of the knowledge spiral process at the epistemological dimension are intention, autonomy, fluctuation and creative chaos, redundancy and requisite variety.

The knowledge spiral is driven by organizational intention. Efforts to achieve the intention take the form of a strategy to develop the organizational capability to acquire, create, accumulate and exploit knowledge. The second condition for promoting the knowledge spiral is autonomy. At the individual level, all members of an organization should be allowed to act autonomously as far as circumstances permit. Autonomy increases the chance of unexpected opportunities arising and the possibility that individuals will motivate themselves to create new knowledge.

Original ideas emanate from autonomous individuals, diffuse within a team and then become organizational ideas.

The third condition is fluctuation and creative chaos, which stimulates interaction between the organization and the external environment. Fluctuation is different from complete disorder and is characterized by order without recursiveness whose pattern is at first hard to predict [Gle87]. When fluctuation is introduced into an organization, its members face a breakdown of routine, habits or cognitive frameworks, and the opportunity to reconsider their fundamental thinking and perspective and to hold dialogue as a means of social interaction to create new concepts and knowledge. Some have called this phenomenon creating order out of noise or order out of chaos.⁸

8 According to the principle of order out of noise, the self-organizing system can increase its ability to survive by purposefully introducing such noise into itself [Foe84]. Order in the natural world includes not only the static and crystallized order in which entropy is zero but also the unstable order in which new structures are formed by the work of matter and energy. The latter is order out of chaos according to the theory of dissipative structure [Pri84].

In an evolutionary planning perspective, moreover, Jantsch argues: “In contrast to widely held belief, planning in an evolutionary spirit therefore does not result in the reduction of uncertainty and complexity, but their increases.

Uncertainty increases because the spectrum of options is deliberately widened; imagination comes into play”

[Jan80]. Researchers who have developed the chaos theory have found the creative nature of chaos [Gle87;

Wal92]. Nonaka also applied the chaos theory to management [Non88; Zim93].

Chaos is generated naturally when the organization faces a real crisis. It can also be generated intentionally when the organization’s leaders try to evoke a sense of crisis among organizational members by proposing challenging goals. This intentional creative chaos increases tension within the organization and focuses the attention of organizational members on defining the problem and resolving the crisis situation.

This approach is in sharp contrast to the information-processing paradigm, in which a problem is simply given and a solution found through a process of combining relevant information based on a preset algorithm. Such a process ignores the importance of defining the problem. To attain definition, a problem must be constructed from the knowledge available at a certain point in time and context.

Anyway, the benefits of creative chaos can only be realized when organizational members are able to reflect upon their actions. Without reflection, fluctuation tends to lead to destructive chaos. To make chaos truly creative, the knowledge creating organization is required to institutionalize this reflection-in-action, which induces and strengthens the subjective commitment of individuals.

Redundancy is the fourth condition that enables an organizational knowledge spiral. Redundancy means the existence of information that goes beyond the immediate operational requirements of organizational members. For organizational knowledge creation to take place a concept created by an individual or group must be shared by others, who may not need the concept immediately. Sharing redundant information promotes the sharing of tacit knowledge, because individuals sense what others are trying to articulate. In this way, redundancy of information speeds up the knowledge creation process. Redundancy is especially important in the concept development stage, when it is critical to articulate images rooted in tacit knowledge.

At this stage, redundant information enables individuals to invade each other’s functional boundaries and offer advice or provide new information from different perspectives. Redundancy of information brings about learning by intrusion into each individual’s sphere of perception. Even within a strictly hierarchical organization, redundant information helps to build unusual communication channels and to facilitate interchange between people’s hierarchy and non-hierarchy.

There are several ways to build redundancy into organization. One is to adopt the overlapping approach, in which different functional departments work together in a fuzzy division of labour [Tak86]. Another is to divide the product development team into competing groups: each group develops a different approach to the same project

and then the groups come together to argue over the advantages and disadvantages of their proposals. Another way is through a strategic rotation of personnel, especially between vastly different areas of technology or functions such as R&D and marketing. Such rotation helps organizational members understand their business from multiple perspectives, thereby making organizational knowledge more fluid and easier to apply. It also enables the diversification of skills and information sources.

The extra information held by individuals across different functions helps the organization to expand its knowledge creation capacity. Redundancy of information increases the amount of information to be processed: it can lead to information overload and increase the cost of knowledge creation, at least in the short run.

Therefore, a balance between the creation and processing of information is needed.

One way to deal with the possible downside of redundancy is to make clear where information can be located and where knowledge is stored within the organization.

The fifth condition that helps to advance the knowledge spiral is requisite variety. An organization’s internal diversity must match the variety and complexity of the external environment in order to deal with challenges posed by its environment [Ash56]. Organizational members can cope with many contingencies if they possess requisite variety, which can be enhanced by combining information differently, flexibly and quickly and providing equal access to information throughout the organization. To maximize variety, everyone in the organization should be assured of direct and rapid access to the widest variety of necessary information [Num89].