Leaders On A Quest For The Ideal
What role do leaders and teams play in a Knowledge-creating company?
Over the last two weeks, weâve explored the Spiral of Knowledge and how to express the inexpressible, i.e. converting tacit knowledge into high-value explicit knowledge an entire organization can benefit from.
Today I want to get tactical and answer this question:
What role do leaders and teams play in a Knowledge-creating Company?
The answer involves chaos and context. Direction and dialogue. Creation and conflict.
Bring On The Chaos
Consider this.
In a company with five people, there are ten lines of communication.
In a company with ten people, there are 45 lines of communication.
Adding four more people more than doubles the lines of communication to 91.
This is chaos, and itâs exponential (pretty exponential chaos).
You need someone to orient this chaos of communication toward purposeful creation.
Enter your leaders.
Hereâs the deal:
Leaders sit at the intersection of a companyâs vertical and horizontal information flows. They bring direction by giving voice to a companyâs future.
Think back to the Honda example I shared last week. Those leaders used metaphors and symbols to orient their employees' knowledge-creating activities (designing a new car concept).
According to IkujirĹ Nonaka in his book, The Knowledge-creating Company, leaders must constantly ask the following questions:
What are we trying to learn?
What do we need to know?
Where should we be going?
Who are we?
By answering these questions, leaders set standards for what is considered valuable knowledge.
As Nonaka puts it:
âIn most companies, the ultimate test for measuring the value of new knowledge is economicâincreased efficiency, lower costs, improved ROI. But in the knowledge-creating company, other, more qualitative factors are equally important.â
Some examples he provides include the following:
Does the idea embody the companyâs vision?
Is it an expression of top managementâs aspirations and strategic goals?
Does it have the potential to build the companyâs organizational knowledge network?
In effect, leaders are the bridge between the visionary ideals of those above them and the daily chaos on the front line. Where front-line employees are focused on knowing what is, leaders should be focused on knowing what ought to be. As âknowledge engineersâ of the knowledge-creating company, they remake reality according to the companyâs vision.
As one senior researcher at Honda put it:
â[Leaders] are romantics who go in quest of the ideal.â
The best leaders adopt a forward-looking approach to strategic questions, applying their pattern-matching skills honed through years of experience. They often donât, and arguably shouldnât, have detailed knowledge of specific situations to opine on operating issues frequently.
Thatâs what they build teams for.
Teams Provide A Shared Context
Teams play a central role in companies that create knowledge because they provide a shared context for two vital cogs in the learning flywheel:
Dialogue
Reflection
Dialogue
In dialogue, people become observers of their own thinking. People in dialogue also begin to observe the collective nature of thought. Physicist David Bohm said that âMost thought is collective in origin. Each individual does something with it, but it originates collectively by and large.â
Teams âdo something withâ the knowledge created in dialogue. A team accesses a larger âpool of common meaning,â which cannot be accessed individually. In doing so, individual members are transformed.
âWords transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.â - Ursula K. Le Guin
Reflection
If dialogue transforms individuals, articulates a unique vision for a team, and creates new knowledge, then reflection may prove essential for realizing a purpose for that vision and knowledge. Through reflection, we identify what most resonates from the raw, often chaotic back-and-forth of dialogue.
Freud said that the goal of analysis is to make the unconscious conscious.
By naming something:
It becomes an accepted norm.
It can positively influence a course of events.
I witnessed this at a recent workshop we ran for a client. Everyone in the room personally understood the concept of âno judgment.â And so we began, believing that everyone had a voice.
But then my co-facilitator noticed one person was quiet. She called him out gently. He said he was waiting to get all the facts before he spoke up. Turns out he didnât feel safe speaking his mind. Not until "no judgment" was made explicit by everyone else in the room did he feel confident to speak his mind. He was the youngest in the group but ended up being the biggest contributor.
Whatâs the bottom line?
Reflect on dialogue and make the implicit explicit.
Thatâs what teams who excel at learning do.
Bringing It All Together
If there is one thing weâve learned as a learning consultancy, itâs that people learn best from each other.
If you resonate with the roles of leaders and teams Iâve outlined above, I highly recommend you bring them together as often as possible in Cohort Learning Experiences.
This form of corporate learning has intangible value that goes far beyond straight-up skills transfer. By bringing people together intentionally in this format, youâll promote engagement, boost retention, and generate a flywheel of dialogue and reflection guaranteed to create new knowledge for your business.
If you want proof, get in touch on LinkedIn. Letâs talk about how you can become a Knowledge-creating company.