Knowledge Management & Organisational Development

In organisational development, a possible goal is to impart knowledge, with the goal being for everyone to have the knowledge that they need to perform at some required level. Organisations that incentivise this model of learning and performance will tend to succeed at re-producing a common core of knowledge and standards of performance.

A system breeds uniformity when it is designed to eliminate deviations. When “measure and improve” is the tried-and-tested way, it can feel almost heretical to suggest courses of action where there isn’t a straightforward line of progress between the present and the future. The free energy required to take such actions in the first place is limited, and the chance of transformational initiatives succeeding falls in proportion to the energy required to persuade measurers to suspend orthodoxy.

The antithesis to the impart-and-promote model would be to look for knowledge that the organisation doesn’t have, and to recognise the effective application of that knowledge.

There are conceptual challenges that are inherent to such a model, for instance, in how to realistically identify knowledge that the organisation doesn’t currently have, because the organisation can’t know what it doesn’t know. However, this doesn’t mean such models are impractical; some organisations do find success, by being intentional in recruiting. Another tactic is to create a bias towards diversity, but I expect the adaptive value of this will vary depending on the survival imperatives underlying your ecosystem; caveat emptor.

Another conceptual challenge is that the transformative drive tends towards decoherence, over time. A theoretically perfect transformation champion would have a plan for the return of “measure and improve” that is as rich as the plan to break away from the start state.

In reality, no organisation will be perfectly in either ideological orientation; leaders and individuals can and do exercise agency to create pockets of chaos and influence the direction of drift. It is a mercy.

On the Arts of the Courtier

From The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel:

The king believes that even if he were not king, he would still be a great man. This is because God likes him.

He needs to be liked and he needs to be right. But above all he needs to be listened to, with very close attention.

Never enter a contest of wills with the king.

Do not flatter him. Instead, give him something he can take credit for.

Ask him questions to which you know the answers. Do not ask him the other sort of question.

The Mirror and the Light (2020), p.336

A few pages earlier, “ars longa, vita brevis” was given by Henry as, “Life is short and art is long, the opportunity sudden and fleeting: experiment dangerous, judgment difficult.” Later (and more pithily) by Chaucer, “The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.”