Organizational Development: A Manual for Managers and ... - FPDL

In 1995, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi published their great book, “The Knowledge-
Creating Company”. In this book, they contend that Japanese companies have become successful
because of their skills and expertise at ‘organizational knowledge creation’, which is based on the
initiative of the individual and the interaction that takes place within the group. It was stressed that
teams play a central role in the knowledge-creation process since they provide a shared context in
which individuals can interact with each other.
Authors of the book classify human knowledge into two kinds. “One is explicit knowledge, which
can be articulated in formal language including grammatical statements, mathematical
expressions, specifications, manuals, and so forth. This kind of knowledge thus can be transmitted
across individuals formally and easily. This has been the dominant mode of knowledge in the
Western philosophical tradition. However, we shall argue, a more important kind of knowledge is
tacit knowledge, which is hard to articulate in formal language. It is personal knowledge embedded
in individual experience and involves intangible factors such as personal belief, perspective, and
the value system. Tacit knowledge has been overlooked as a critical component of collective
human behaviour.” The ‘Japanese intellectual tradition’ played a crucial role in developing tacit
knowledge - distinguished by the ‘oneness’ of humanity and nature, of body and mind, and of self
and other.
Nonaka and Takeuchi see the primarily role of any organization in the organizational knowledgecreation
process as providing the proper context for facilitating group activities, as well as creating
and accumulating knowledge at the individual level. They discuss five conditions required at the
organizational level to promote the knowledge spiral:
• Intention (an organization’s aspiration toward its goals);
• Autonomy (is the organization allows autonomous action at the individual level);
• Fluctuation and Creative Chaos (‘breakdown’ of routines, habits, or cognitive frameworks);
• Redundancy (existence of information that goes beyond the immediate operational
requirements); and
• Requisite Variety (that must match the variety and complexity of the environment and can
be enhanced by combining information differently, flexibly, and quickly, and by providing
equal access to information throughout the organization).”
They developed the ‘Five-Phase Model of the Organizational Knowledge Creation Process’:
• Sharing Tacit Knowledge (“the individuals’ emotions, feelings, and mental models have to
be shared to build mutual trust”);
• Creating Concepts (“once a shared mental model is formed in a field of interaction, the
self-organizing team then articulates it through further continuous dialog, …[until] it is
verbalized into words and phrases, and finally crystallized into an explicit concept”);
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