Lately, I’ve been reading Schön (1979) about the power of generative metaphors. He views metaphors “as the basis for how we make sense of the world. In his view, metaphors serve our understanding of the world by drawing out similarities, and assigning meanings to a situation by making connections.”
The seminal work on metaphor is Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By. I remember reading it in college, and its impactful ideas have stuck with me ever since. Lakoff and Johnson explain that metaphors guide much of our thinking in ways of which we are often totally unaware. “The essence of a metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.” They use the example of the common metaphor, argument is war. We are all very aware that an argument and a war are different things. Nevertheless, we structure, understand and talk about argument in terms of war:
- He attacked every point in my argument.
- I’ve never won an argument with him.
- His criticisms were right on target.
- You disagree? Okay shoot.
- If you use that strategy, he will wipe you out.
Applying the terms of war to argument influences how we think about arguing and even how we act when in an argument. For example, we attempt to win, rather than focusing on understanding the other’s perspective. Thus the metaphor argument as war influences how we engage with one another. Lakoff and Johnson argue that a metaphor is not just a choice of words; it is how we think. Metaphors are useful to us to construct and explain our ideas, but at the same time, they limit us. For example, using the metaphor, argument as war, blinds us to the possibility that there is another way to engage those with whom we disagree. (see the Public Conversation Project on how to talk with someone on the other side of an issue or Better Angels on how Reds and Blues can interact with each other.)
Schön provides this organizational example, “if we say that an organization is fragmented then it follows that what is needed is more integration. But a fragmented organization might be seen, alternatively, as composed of ‘semi-autonomous units.’” By employing the metaphor of fragmentation, a tacit image arises of the organization as something broken, something that once was whole and needs to be made whole again. Schön argues that by becoming aware of the metaphors we use, “we can do a better job of problem setting, which can make people in organizations perform creative leaps into seeing old problems in new ways.”
Re-reading the literature on metaphor led me to think about the metaphors we use for knowledge management. KM professionals primarily use the metaphor knowledge is an object. Regarding knowledge as an object implies that those objects, much like books in a library, can be collected and stored where others can find them and can take what they need when they need it. The knowledge as an object metaphor has resulted in KM setting up repositories, lessons learned sites and wikis – the modern forms of libraries.
One of the most prominent KM practices is the idea of sharing those important objects across the organization. Knowledge sharing is often depicted in graphic form as an object in one person’s head with lines drawn to the head of another. Sharing itself is a metaphor and a positive one. It seems like something we all ought to do. After all, we were taught as children to share our objects, such as toys, treats, pets. And indeed, the sharing metaphor has been useful to KM in that it prompted us to set up CoPs, where participants could easily learn what practices others employ as well as what tools they use.
Although undoubtedly helpful, the metaphor of knowledge as an object has also limited how we implement KM. It has resulted in KM primarily focusing on existing knowledge that can be collected and shared, but it has made us blind to the critical knowledge that Leonard calls “deep smarts” or Polanyi called tacit knowledge; knowledge that cannot be transmitted through a quick response to a CoP question or in an online document. It also results in us not taking into account the fluidity of knowledge, that is, that what we “know” is continually growing and changing within our minds, as well as within our teams and organizations. (see my post on Transferring Expertise)
We could add to the metaphors we use to think about knowledge; seeing knowledge not as an object, but as construction, something that is continually assembled and reassembled within the mind of individuals based on input from their own experience, what they read and what they hear and see from others. If one of our metaphors were knowledge as construction, then we would encourage greater focus on individual reflection and on teams coming together to learn from their actions jointly. We would increase the interaction of employees across internal boundaries. We would emphasize ways to bring people together to assemble new knowledge collectively – not just brainstorm (another metaphor) but to build further understanding of a situation or a problem, perhaps to jointly reframe an issue. The metaphor of knowledge as construction would give us a whole new vocabulary we would think about building, producing, assembling, reassembling, creating and reframing knowledge rather than just collecting and sharing existing knowledge.
As KM professionals, we have inherited the KM metaphor of knowledge as an object from the past. If we now want to grow KM to be more relevant to the complexity that organizations face, we need to both become aware of the metaphors that we are currently using, and think clearly about the metaphors we could use to expand the role of knowledge management.