1. What makes TED’s presentations so amazing? (www.ted.com)
2. It is the people they invite and the ideas they bring.
3. What kinds of ideas?
4. They are mostly innovative ways of thinking about concepts.

Two examples of that are the presentations of Kevin Kelly and of Susan Blackmore referred to technology. They both brought the concept of technology with meaningful novelties and obliged the listeners to rethink our ideas about that subject. After a 45 minutes listening them we have had modified strongly our concept of technology.

Kevin Kelly

(http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/kevin_kelly_on_how_technology_evolves.html)

He started by bringing new versions of our old idea of technology. “Technology is everything that was created after we have born”, and “technology is everything that is not yet working quite well”. Both definitions made the public laugh a bit and opened their minds to new ways of thinking about a subject that we thought we had our ideas very well defined.

But after that he used the biological world, something that people already know very well, as reference and source of patterns, and started to compare them with technology. (We always use old concepts for trying to understand the new ones.) He compared graphically the pattern of evolution of life with the pattern of evolution of technology, trying to show how technology has similarities with the way life evolves on earth. His invitation was: lets think of technology as if it were a seventh kingdom of the living world. Indeed he stated that idea, but he did not try to proof his statement; he just compared the 5 features of natural world (ubiquity, diversity, specialization, complexity and socialization) with some features of technology.

Most of us are used to think of technology as objects that are not alive, mostly as machines and tools we use for doing our activities, or as applications of our scientific knowledge. But Kevin Kelly invited us to think of technology as if it were something alive that through time, in a long-term frame, evolves in the same way living organisms does. His analogy changes the way we observe technological phenomena and give clues of aspects to start to put attention. He finished his presentation with a philosophical reflection inviting people to embrace technology as a way of going further in the route of diversification, and of exploring new possibilities of human life.

Susan Blackmore

(http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/susan_blackmore_on_memes_and_temes.html)

She brings a different reflection on the concept of technology. She also started with an analogy: we humans are the Earth’s Pandoran species. Her reasoning comes from memetics and the evolution theory, but she does not compare patterns of evolution of kingdoms. She presented the main features of genes, of memes and of replicators. Her arguments were a bit more abstract than those used by of Kevin Kelly and she applied to technology the same algorithm of evolution: variation, selection and heredity/replication.

She started with the concept of memes (information that is copied through imitation) and how they use human brains for replicating and redefines technology as a kind of meme. She indeed brought a new term “Teme”, a fusion of technology and meme. Based on that definition, she explored how the temes could be using our societies for replicating themselves with no interest in the risks that they could be for the planet or for humanity.

She did not invite us to think of technology as if it were like memes, but stated that technology is indeed a kind of replicator that shares the same properties of memes. She doesn’t suggest an analogy here. She states that technology IS a particular kind of meme. She brings a new set of concepts for defining what technology is. For her technology is the third level of replication: genes are the first level, memes are the second and temes are the third one. With that introduction she presented the concept of technology as a sub-field of the theory of evolution. The theoretical realm of the concept was displaced radically. She finished expressing her concern about the possible impacts of the 3rd replicator, suggesting the importance of understanding what it means for our future.

The concepts of technology of Kevin Kelly and of Susan Blackmore brought to us are very different from the concept that was predominant in the Science and in the Science Fiction of the XX Century. Technology for them is not an artificial and highly sophisticated imagined brain that, suddenly, becomes alive: an advanced robot, a the computer of a spaceship. It is not a Matrix that feeds from batteries made of humans. Technology is information embedded in objects (physical or abstract) that becomes alive and evolves through us, like the genes do. It is a replicator that exists currently, that have been co-evolving with us throughout our history, and that use us as means for their replication, just like we are means for the genes and for the memes to replicate. So, they present technology as something “alive”, not as in science fiction, not as in romantic speculations of a world what could exist in the future. They present “alive” technology as a new facet of our past and current reality.

They both have modified strongly the concept of technology through analogies and through applying new conceptual framework to it. They took the concept from the realm of inactive objects; we are used to think of, toward the realm of living being or of replicators.

In both cases technology starts to be connected with a lot of completely new set of logical networks. This new set of interactions triggers, through time, a huge diversity of reflections, thoughts and surprising discoveries in our minds. These new thoughts are manifestations of the generative potential of innovative concepts.

Note 1: In these cases the concept that was modified was an abstract one: technology. However this same kind of movements can be done with concrete concepts like: book, clothes, and so on.

Note 2:These notes have had not the intention of deepening in the meaning of the temes, but  of taking the presentations as examples of changing and expending a concept (technology) that we all think that we already know quite well.

Note 3: The next note will be about why conceptual innovation is the most effective way of multiplying the universe of memes and temes.

The Cognitive Processes behind Conceptual Innovation

Abstract
The first part of this article introduces the concept of conceptual innovation, why this kind of innovation is becoming more important this century, what are the main features that distinguishes it from technical innovation and its utility for professional performance and development. Previously to enter in the subject of conceptual innovation the article will explain some roles of the concept and why it is important to evolve conceptually. The second part will describe some methods for innovating at the conceptual level and give some ideas about how to apply these methods in different situations. The purpose of the whole article is to offer cognitive resources for people who are facing situations that challenge them for generating breakthroughs and for going through disruptive changes.

Introduction
We are living a time of conceptual innovation, every place we look at we see new terms. The novelty of these terms is not only as words or brands, but also as meaning and conception: Wikipedia, Open CourseWare, Creative Commons, Prediction Markets, Blogs, Podcasts, etc., etc. If we go back few years we find Webpage, email, cell phone, hybrid cars, hubs, and many brands of software applications. All these terms are new products, not only improvement of old ones. If we go to the realm of theories and methods we will find an even more diverse forest of terms: knowledge management, world café, collective intelligence, balanced scorecard, intellectual capital, self-organization, emotional intelligence, learning algorithms, conceptual age, complexity economy, etc. Most of them are also names of successful books that explain these main concepts and the constellation of not-so-new or not-so-important concepts around them.

The invention of new products and terms, conceptually distinct from their predecessors is not exclusive of our times. We can go throughout human history and we will find the emergence of new terms, and radically new innovations. (The first stone axe was a breakthrough innovation for hundred thousand years. It is hard to imagine the feeling of amazement and fear of other groups when they made their first contact with that marvelous technology). What are new now is the pace of their emergence and spread, and the impact of their use in our life, both as object and as abstract entities. What is new also is their relation with technology. Fifty years or one century ago (and before that) most innovations were based on a small group of technologies, but more and more, in the last decades, they became points of convergence of multiple technologies, concepts and former innovations.

The Wikipedia is a good example. In its “self-definition”: “Wikipedia … is a multilingual, web-based, free content encyclopedia project. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers; its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the web site. The name is a portmanteau of the words Wiki (a type of collaborative website) and encyclopedia.” (This definition is a self-definition that was found looking for “Wikipedia” in the Wikipedia.)

The definition is clear and leaves no space for doubts about its main characteristic. It is an encyclopedia. Its particularity as encyclopedia is that it is a web-based one. In the way it is used it is also new; it is an encyclopedia that is free content. In the method of its construction it is also particular, because volunteers write it collaboratively. Finally, it is a type of Wiki. The Web and the Wiki are themselves new concepts. The Wiki is a type of collaborative website. The website, is in itself a new concept that emerged in the mid 90s, combining a diversity of other concepts, including the hypertext among them. The concept of hypertext is in itself a main breakthrough; it is a fusion of the concepts of text with hyperspace. The concept of hyperspace comes from the multidimensional non-Euclidian geometry that was developed in the end of the 19th Century. And the story could continue some more steps.
What comes up from the example of Wikipedia is the continue emergence of new concepts of products based in the combination of many other existing, but not so old, concepts and technologies. The expression of Daniel Pink that we are living in a conceptual age is really adequate. (Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind, 2005) Every day breakthrough products are emerging as combinations of a diversity of existing products and technologies. The main innovation is not in their components (taking each one of them in isolate form), the innovation is in the role the new product plays in our lives, in the way its components are combined and in how they were modified for making possible that combination.
The intension of this article is to explore some elements of the cognitive processes that are behind the creation of new concepts. Its purpose is increasing the effectiveness of the attempts of creating new concepts both as ideas and as physical objects.

Concepts
We use concepts all the time. Concepts are abstract artifacts we have created for thinking and for expressing our ideas. Concepts are ways of grouping and classifying things, both physical and abstractions. Concepts were invented for dealing with the world, for organizing the way we represent that world in our minds and the way we think and for communicating our ideas. There are uncountable definitions of concepts: American Heritage Dictionary (Concept is “A general idea derived or inferred from specific instances or occurrences. Something formed in the mind; a thought or notion.” See The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004), Merriam Webster (“Concept is an abstract or generic idea generalized from particular instances.” Merriam Webster, http://www.m-w.com), Wikipedia (“A concept is an abstract idea or a mental symbol, typically associated with a corresponding representation in language or symbology, that denotes all of the objects in a given category or class of entities, interactions, phenomena, or relationships between them.” See Wikipedia, http://www.wikipedia.org), etc.

The invention of concepts is, probably, the single most important cognitive innovation in human history. Concepts are the content of language. Language emerges combining and expressing the portfolio of concepts a human group have developed. And the development of language is the most important cognitive revolution in human history. Through language humans were able for first time of communicating knowledge, not only information, to their peers.

If we use the analogy of networks, the concepts can be seen as hubs that connect other concepts through propositions. For example, the concept Car connects with all the propositions referred to cars. “The car is a machine” connects the concept Car with the concept Machine. “The car consumes fossil fuels” connects the concept Car with fossil fuels and makes explicit a particular kind of relation with a particular kind of resource fossil fuels, and through it with emission of CO2 and with the environmental issues. If a concept is modified the perturbation can propagate through the propositions that use that concept and impact all the area around it. (However, concepts are dynamic entities. They not only connect other concepts and propositions in a static network but for their projective properties they also modify the network of meanings (theory) in which they are imbedded.)

We can think of Car in different dimensions: as a machine, as a social symbol, as a polluter, as a cognitive artifact, etc. The car contains an amazing combination of knowledge of its designers, makers, dealers, users, and maintainers. If we go through the different dimensions of the concept Car we find different ‘dimensional’ groups of propositions connected by that concept. The concept Car is a hub that connects all these dimensions. If we introduce a new dimension to the concept Car, as the aesthetical dimension of the car, we open a new group of relations with the propositions about the aesthetic of this kind of objects. In this dimension the cars will be connected to jewels, sculptures, paintings, etc. (These examples show that we can expand a concept introducing new dimensions into it.)

In the 80s, the Report of the Brundland Commission “Our Common Future” made known the concept of sustainability with three dimensions: social, economic and ecological. That Report changed the way people have been thinking about sustainability. Its influence spread gradually to all theories where the concept of sustainability was relevant. (We will come back to the addiction of new dimensions to concepts when talking about methods of conceptual innovation.)

Concepts are theoretical/abstract entities but they are not the same as theories. Theories are networks of propositions. Concepts may be components of propositions or hubs that group a diversity of propositions. They are also key elements of theories, because of the influence they project in the propositions and through them in theories or groups of theories. When a concept changes, it changes the map of propositions around it and all the propositions that use it. Concepts, in general, influence an area of a theory, or areas of a group of theories. In some special cases a concept may influence or generate whole theories and wholes industries. (It is possible to say that the concept Car is my theory of cars, but it is adequate only in a reduced sense.)
The concept of gravitation of Isaac Newton modified the whole understanding of physics and cosmology of the 17th century. A small group of concepts of mass/inertia, force, and reaction redefined by Newton, organized in equations, made possible the creation of a mechanical theory of the world that lasted for two Centuries, 18th and 19th. The concept of “plate tectonics”, that emerged in the second half of the 20th century, transformed completely the understanding of the evolution of earth, made possible modern geology and influenced strongly the sciences of earth. The concept of “Evolution” of Charles Darwin redefined the theories about the evolution of life (and earth) and created a whole group of evolutionary theories: biology, medicine, psychology, anthropology, computation, economy, epistemology, earth sciences, etc. The concept of falsifiability developed by Karl Popper in the 50s of last century changed the scientific method and after that begun to influence all scientific theories.

Concepts have also other functions that we are not so aware of them. It is about perception. Concepts influence perception strongly. When we observe situations and try to make sense of what we are “seeing” our brain differentiates two kinds of signals: information and noise. Information is the signals that we can interpret. Noises are all other signals. The signals become information at the moment that they can be processed in some way by the cognitive artifacts of our brain. Concepts are in the heart of most of these cognitive artifacts capable of transforming noise into information. (Like the concepts, the memory of former experiences can also enable perception. If a situation resembles a former experience, in some way, we can perceive it despite not having concepts for processing the signals we are observing. Analogies may play an important role in those cases. However, for being able to think about them we deploy our battery of concepts. Most of the time the elements of the battery we deploy are old concepts. The necessity of making those old concepts adequate to the new realities is a factor that drives the improvement of concepts forward.)
“While a given situation can be conceived in a variety of ways, it is always a concept-structured situation. There are no observations, data, perceptions, objects, independent of concepts. We cannot even name things without giving clues to the concepts which make “things” of the situations confronting us.” (Donald Schön)

If we are enjoying a soccer game and we understand a bit of tactics of soccer, we can see the actions of the players in the game and, at the same time, we “see” the evolution of the tactics throughout the game, the strengths and weaknesses of those tactics, and how the coaches are managing them. We can establish relation between the performance of the players and the tactics of the coach; and in many cases we can estimate the probability of which a team will be the winner of the game. (Change and individual ingenuity of the players always has an important role in soccer. So the final score will be a combination of these three elements: tactics, players’ ingenuity and chance.) People who don’t know about tactics only enjoy the actions of the players. The concept of tactics enhances our perception about what is going on in the game.

This example can be generalized. Our capacity for understanding all kind of phenomena depends greatly of the battery of concepts we can deploy for dealing with their situations. Those phenomena that are beyond the reach of our conceptual framework are also beyond our understanding capacity and also beyond the reach of our channels for perceiving them with clarity. Concepts are like lenses, they change the way we see the reality. With some concepts in mind we can “see” some elements, facets, dimensions of reality, and with other group of concepts we perceive different aspects of the same reality. Concepts change our eyes.
Frequently our limitations for understanding some theories, situations or phenomena are not a question of brainpower but a question of concept-power. We cannot understand adequately a phenomenon if we lack the concepts for making sense of the elements of that phenomenon, for establishing relations among them and for identifying a logic in its evolution. (It can be highly beneficial to take a look at the concepts we are deploying for understanding an object we have in mind and relate the map of our understandings (and fuzzy points) with the maps of concepts we are using.)

As we learn we improve our concepts, as we improve our concepts we open new possibilities of learning. When my grandson has 15 months old he had only two categories for animals: “au-au” for dogs and “coco” for “not-dogs”. When he was almost 2 years old (March, 2007), his had improved the concept of “not-dogs” with coco-horse, coco-chicken, coco-cat and coco-cow. He could not pronounce horse, chicken, cat or cow, he just pronounce “coco” for these four categories, it is a problem of limited phonetic skills, but in his mind he could already identify them as distinct classes of animals. He has begun the creation of sub-categories of not-dogs at the same time he begun to perceive differences between those groups of animals. With his new battery of concepts for classifying animals he will refine his perceptions and will be able to learn much more about those estrange not-human creatures.

What is conceptual innovation?
Conceptual innovation is not something new. All the great innovations of human history contained new concepts or fundamental conceptual changes. The reason for writing this article about conceptual innovation is the greater importance it is acquiring in current times.

The number of examples of conceptual innovation can be huge: the fishing hook, the fishing traps, the turbojet, the Indian numerals, the Compass, the paper, the scientific method, etc., all them brought new concepts to life and produced a surprise, a strong aha, in the mind of those smart people who had the opportunity to see them for first time.
Conceptual innovation is the innovation of concepts. If we take a functional definition of “Concept” as a thread that connects facts and ideas for creating meaning, we can think of conceptual innovation as a thread that connects multiple partial innovations for creating a qualitative change in a concept or in an object.
In the cases we are considering here the Concept can be an abstract entity that exists independently or can be embedded in an object. The number “One” is an abstract entity, despite his material origin, once invented it exists without connection to any physical object. The invention of the number “One” is the invention of an abstract entity. In the case of the fishing hook or the paper there is a concept of fishing hook or of paper embedded in the objects. The invention of the fishing hook is a conceptual innovation, because it created a new way of doing and of understanding the activity of capturing fishes.

Once the fishing hook was invented it made possible to think about partial/technical innovations related to it. These technical innovations were related to some features or to some components the fishing hook, like the innovations in the form of its barb, in its material (wood, bones, metal), in the size of its eye, in the method used for connecting it with the line, etc. all these innovations were triggered by the existence of the hook.

In this article, when we refer to the term “object” we are referring both to the physical object as to the concept that we deploy in our mind when we look or think about the object, as if the object had its concept embedded in it. When we say the fishing hook, we are referring both to the hook as a physical object and the concept of the hook, the abstract expression of the hook that we bear in our mind. The invention of the hook as a physical object for capturing fishes, and the creation of the concept of the hook in the mind of its creator were processes absolutely interconnected.
We say conceptual innovation to the innovation that goes beyond the improvement of some features of the object. We say conceptual innovation to the innovation that redefines the object or, in some case, creates a whole new object. In conceptual innovation we improve not only a group of features of the object but we also change the way these features are interrelated, and the functional relation of those features.

 The fishing hook, invented 30 to 40 thousand years ago, was a completely new object. Before the invention of the hook there was nothing similar to it. After the fishing hook invention the fishes became captured in a completely new way. In that case the inventors of the fishing hook created both a new object and a new concept.

 The Indian Numerals redefined the notation of the numbers, generating a positional structure that defined the value of the digits. It brought a whole new way of writing numbers. The positional structure of the numbers simplified greatly the algorithms for doing the basic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) and created favorable conditions for the invention of calculating machines.

 The scientific method redefined the whole process of knowledge generation, the function of the experiment and its main characteristics. Before the scientific method experiments were means for advancing in the design of objects, like a machine or any artifact. In the scientific method the main purpose of the experiment is to generate evidence for falsifying or for supporting the theoretical hypotheses.

 The turbojet redefined the engine of internal combustion. It was invented based on the internal combustion engine, but it had a completely different logic. In the turbojet there is no cycles going on, no strokes happening, no crankshaft rotating, no pistons moving up and down, but a continuous process of taking in air, combustion, turbine rotation and expulsion of the heated gases.

 The PC redefined the computer, its internal structure, its components and the way they were used. The PCs from their start had a very different architecture respect to the IBM 360. The PDA was a second wave of conceptual innovation in the computer industry, changing not only the size of the computer but its nature. The PDA is a handheld and mobile object that can be used not only in an “office” but he made the corridors, cafes, and streets work as “office” for short times.

Why Conceptual Innovation is so important
In the beginning of the 70s Alvin Toffler expressed his concern about fast changes of the industrial society in its transformation into a super-industrial society and how it could overwhelm people and require a new level of adaptation capacity. (See Alvin Toffler, Future Shock, 1971) His definition of the “future shock” was “too much change in too short a period of time”. (Wikipedia). From that time to now, the pace of change and, particularly, the pace of knowledge generation have multiplied by 3 or more.
With the globalization of the communications and of the use of Internet the pace of the knowledge generation and its impact in the evolution of the professions made the requirement of maintaining updated more and more challenging. Those professionals trained in the application of some technologies begun to feel that they were getting out of date faster then they could react. New

Obviously, this question cannot be answered in just a few words; however, this article can give some useful suggestions for becoming reflective practitioners.

Ever since Donald Schön published his works in 1983 and 1987, the idea of the reflective practitioner, and the topics associated with how a professional applies and acquires knowledge in the exercise of his or her profession, have become key factors of professional performance and development.

The concept of reflective practitioner is increasingly being applied in several disciplines, particularly education, the medical sciences and some engineering fields.

Today, the quality of the intellectual activities (observation, analogies, analysis, synthesis, imagination, etc.) that a professional carries out during his workday is an indicator of his level of development.

Concepts such as knowledge-in-action, reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action are of growing importance for those who want to develop professionally.

We can even classify professions and professionals based on the analysis of the knowledge methods and tools they use in the exercise of their profession.

Once people become aware of the importance of developing as a reflective practitioner, they ask, “How do I become a reflective practitioner?

The first answer is obvious:
In the same way we learn to ride a bicycle – learning by doing. Becoming a reflective practitioner requires practice.

This brings us to a second question: Which bicycle should we ride? What type of practice will facilitate the development of the skills of a reflective practitioner?

To help answer this question, let’s go to the movies to enjoy the beginning of an action film.

The movie opens with an urban landscape, with its glimmering skyscrapers and impressive skyline. It projects an image of the world as an enormous human beehive. We don’t know what year it is. It is a day just like any other. The people in the scene are mere dots moving in droves toward an anonymous, monotonous destiny.

Suddenly the camera zooms in, the images become larger and we begin to perceive a specific neighborhood. The camera quickly pans the scene until it focuses on a window of a house or building. A dramatic event ensues.

A few minutes later, we have become engrossed in the plot. Over the next several minutes, the succession of events permits us to form an opinion about the story, its characters and the context in which it develops. Emotions begin to flow as the events and the characters appear before us: we feel sympathy or anger; we identify with the characters, support them, etc.

At this point, the movie director has captured us intellectually and emotionally. We are seeing, interpreting and experiencing what he wanted us to.

According to Gillie Bolton:

“The reflective practice is a process of learning and developing through examining our own practice, and opening this to wider scrutiny by others and studying texts from other spheres.”

One of the forms that reflection-in-action assumes is similar to the first moments of an action film.

We are doing something almost automatically, that is, without really thinking about it, when suddenly something disturbs our complacency. We are forced to step out of our routine and pay more attention. We take a mental close up to capture the details, to examine the situation, in an effort to determine what is occurring and why things are not working as expected.

Initially, we do not understand what is happening, but as we notice new details, we soon discover a meaning in what we are witnessing. At this point, emotion bubbles to the surface, our hearts beat a little faster, we feel happy, upset or frightened for a fraction of a second.

We then correct ourselves or reinforce what we were doing in an effort to regain control over the situation. If we are not successful on our first try, we devise another solution and make an effort to apply it. When we are finally successful, we breathe an almost imperceptible sigh of relief. Our heartbeats return to normal.

Over the next several minutes, our thoughts unfold almost spontaneously, as if they had lives of their own. For reflective people, they lead us to reexamine the ideas, beliefs and emotions we had during the situation. The event observed functions as a type of two-way mirror that reveals both the outside and our inner world. The two realities modify one another while our thoughts race about, bringing our mental close up in sharper focus with each movement.

While we are lost in our thoughts, another event shakes us from that abstract world, taking us to another neighborhood and another window. We witness another dramatic scene. Our unfinished thoughts are interrupted, and a new cycle begins before we had a chance to assimilate what we have just experienced. Outside, life continues on its surprisingly “natural” course.

One way to develop our reflective skills is to rerun the movie and more closely observe the details and the context, the outside world and we ourselves. This allows us to notice some details that had previously escaped us.

The more mechanical and unconscious behavior and/or the more surprising or complicated our situation, the more we need to give ourselves the opportunity to re-examine past events, making observation and record a more important activity.

If we manage to review the events with the help of other professionals, more unconscious aspects will rise to the surface. What to us is invisible is obvious to others.
What to us is obvious may be illogical, incomprehensible or unacceptable to others.
What to us is clear cut is ambiguous to others. What to us is right is questionable to others.

The differences in the roles, values, identities and mental frameworks among individuals that observe or have observed the same event produce very diverse perceptions and interpretations.
These differences play a key role in our efforts to verify and deepen our own interpretations.

Writing about our practices, not in the form of a bureaucratic report or a school exam, but rather as a description and/or reflection on the experience, is a way of filming reality, calling attention to the key scenes, taking close ups of words or drawings, creating an object of knowledge that can be revised and further examined by us and/or others. What type of record should we make?

This depends on many factors as well as on our personal preferences. It can be a ship record, like that of Captain Picard of the USS Enterprise; a presentation to colleagues; notes for a future book; notes on a technique; a thematic record; an improved clinical form; a note for the mural newspaper; or a more structured article or paper, etc.

The act of describing an event or a situation is in itself a revision, a recreation, a reinvention of what occurred. What we observe in a movie, as the plot develops, is different from what we tell our friends after we know the ending. We can be analytical or descriptive. What we are writing is already a selection of the events, a selection of those occurrences that are somehow relevant for us.

If we manage to recover what we felt, what we thought, how we reacted to the event, we can significantly increase the importance of our notes.

If we manage to be more decisive in our thinking in an attempt to recover our expectations of results, assumptions regarding how the situation “should” have unfolded, the analytical methods and instruments we used, the criteria we applied in our decisions, etc., we will have notably expanded our capacity for learning from our experience.

The time “wasted” on those activities and thoughts is recovered tenfold with the increased effectiveness and productivity we achieve in our work.

For those who are not in the habit of writing with ink, there is the option of writing with sound. We are all trained in that art. We have known how to speak for some 200,000 years. Writing with sounds can be the first step in storytelling. The Greeks did amazing things with their oral traditions before they ever achieved coherent writing.

A method I frequently use to create knowledge tools and to develop new methods and methodologies (designed mainly to address specific situations) is to begin with the mental reconstruction of the situation and how I and/or other people have addressed similar situations, how we thought and how we acted, the difficulties and successes we have had and how we have been able to apply the results and lessons learned to develop an improved practice. This analytical reconstruction of events, which in my case is more mental than written due to time constraints, has served me numerous times in recent years.

In other articles we will discuss more ways to develop our reflective practice.

We all recognize that the tacit part of knowledge is its most valuable component and that making tacit knowledge explicit is essential for knowledge creation.

We also know that making tacit knowledge explicit is an art that requires the development of new mental habits such as the following: observation, expression, identification of patterns, analysis and abstraction.

This mental activity should take place mostly during professional practice. Nevertheless, our professional training does not give much importance to reflection-in-action. Individuals vary widely in their reflection-in-action skills.

A question that comes to mind is: How can we help people to develop these skills?

There are many methods for developing reflective practitioners, but one of the simplest and most easily applied under the institutional and business conditions of developing countries is knowledge harvesting.

Knowledge harvesting is an easy way to recover explicit knowledge and to make tacit knowledge explicit.

It is a way of expressing the knowledge that experts have acquired through experience, knowledge that the expert may be conscious or barely aware of, but that has not been adequately expressed or included in the organization’s manuals and policies.

Knowledge harvesting is appropriate for extracting knowledge from experts for a clearly defined use. It is extremely practical for the following:

For extracting knowledge from an experienced professional who is retiring from the business, thereby avoiding knowledge flight (this was the main reason for its development in companies in recent years).

For increasing the number of professionals who master the same knowledge of a specialized area, that is, for sharing knowledge. It can help create a culture of knowledge sharing and avoid overspending on knowledge creation when the company already employs people who have the knowledge being sought by others.

For training people how to think systematically, gradually transforming them into reflective practitioners, increasing their capacity to learn and create knowledge as they work. (In my opinion, this is the most important impact of knowledge harvesting in the long term).

How to harvest knowledge

Knowledge harvesting can be carried out in a variety of ways, ranging from an informal conversation between colleagues over a cup of coffee to a structured interview led by a specialist in making tacit knowledge explicit. The different methods share the logical aspects of knowledge harvesting.

The steps that follow were developed for a more structured process; however, those who want to recover the knowledge of others, even if just during an informal conversation, should keep these ideas in mind.

1) Characterize the type of knowledge, whether it is a complete process or simply a technique of a process, if it is understanding clients’ behavior, if it is a way of analyzing, a way of applying a policy, etc.

2) Identify the individuals who need the knowledge to be harvested, their knowledge needs and how they will use the knowledge. It is easier if the knowledge is to be harvested from oneself. If knowledge is to be harvested from others, we must consider potential difficulties, knowledge gaps and how instructions and manuals are used (or not).

3) Once the above elements are defined, the process is prepared:

a) The professional who will play a role in the knowledge harvesting process should read the explicit materials existing and learn about the state of the art in the business. These readings do not need to be exhaustive, but the facilitator cannot begin the process without a clear understanding of what the expert will transmit.

b) Next, efforts should be made to determine which aspects of the harvested knowledge will be shared and which will not. Like in the previous step, the facilitator needs to master the subjects that will be harvested. His or her level of mastery will strongly influence the quality of the knowledge harvested. (Harvesting knowledge is not only a question of applying a methodology; it also implies understanding and processing harvested knowledge).

c) The facilitator should attempt to identify the particular characteristics of the expert’s personality and behavior and adapt to his or her preferences on how to develop the knowledge harvesting process.

4) The explicitation of conversations is a method of knowledge harvesting. These conversations can range from a personal interview in which an individual asks the expert questions while others listen, to a group effort in which the questions are addressed jointly. In all cases, a facilitator should be present to conduct the process.

a) Three types of people can participate in explicitation conversations: Those who need the knowledge to be harvested, because it gives them an opportunity to ask questions. Those who have the same type of technical mastery, because they can help explain some aspects and discuss some points further. A facilitator versed in methods to make knowledge explicit, particularly how to ask questions, interpret and analyze responses, uncover assumptions and lead group knowledge-creation processes.

5) During the conversation to make knowledge explicit, the facilitator will attempt to:

a) Identify the most valuable practices and approaches that the expert masters, and assimilate other knowledge that the expert believes is important.

b) Guarantee that the knowledge identified as necessary by future users is being collected and that the knowledge is clearly expressed.

6) Like in all processes to make knowledge explicit, the facilitator will develop different hypotheses to interpret the expressions of the expert and will ask questions to gain a better understanding of them and to verify what the expert is saying. (This process of developing and verifying interpretive hypotheses is a resource of the facilitator; the conversations should be kept as simple as possible).

7) The facilitator will always use a checklist of the knowledge needs of users to verify what has been made explicit and what is pending for discussion.

Several conversations should take place to make knowledge explicit until the facilitator considers that the explicitation process has achieved its basic objectives.

The ultimate purpose of all knowledge harvesting processes is to discover the logic of an action and decision-making process developed by some expert or exceptional team, and to do so in such a way that the other person can use that knowledge as a guide to implement the same process and obtain the same results.

A useful checklist question is:

If you were in an analogous situation, could you achieve the same results as the expert, following the instructions given, or would you need more information?

If the knowledge reflects the mastery of a process or method, an effective way of expressing that knowledge is a flowchart (software) of the process, with the corresponding questions to each situation and each decision, the criteria to apply in each case, and the guidelines on what to do and what not to do in each situation. (Later we will discuss other useful methods for making tacit knowledge explicit).

The knowledge harvested should be made available to users as soon as possible, even if just in draft form. Using knowledge is what most contributes to its development.

Experience shows that knowledge harvesting should be applied only in organizations where there is an atmosphere conducive to sharing knowledge. In a highly competitive environment among co-workers, knowledge harvesting will probable fail or will produce poor results.

We should consider knowledge harvesting as one of the many tools of knowledge management and remember that it is essential to create a culture of curiosity, systematic reflection and openness to share what has been learned. Activities such as knowledge harvesting should serve to create this type of institutional culture.

Reflective practice is an active process by which professionals increase their capacity for expressing, analyzing and renovating the knowledge they use in their work.

Reflective practice is characterized by increased perception in three interrelated aspects:

1)Actions professionals carry out as part of their work.
2)The thoughts and emotions with which they carry out and/or oversee these actions.
3)The process of generating the results achieved with the actions.

Donald Schon developed the concept of reflective practice based on the double premise that we are not aware of most of the knowledge we use in our daily activities and that we do not know how to express most of our knowledge.

In most of the situations we experience, we know how to do something but we do not know what we know, and we do not know how to express what we know. While our knowledge is expressed in the activity we are carrying out, we are not aware of it and do not know how to express (with word or symbols) the knowledge we are using.

For example: we all know how to speak but most of us do not know the rules of syntax we apply when speaking, nor are we able to explain them to other people.

Michael Polanyi coined the term ‘tacit knowledge’ to describe the knowledge we are not aware of and/or we do not know how to express. In addition, he reevaluated the importance of tacit knowledge.

Reflective practice has two basic stages:
1)What is thought during an action: reflection-in-action
2)What is thought after an action: reflection-on-action

What we think during an action is made of ideas, theories and assumptions, of the emotions we feel, of the imagination that we project and of the observations and interpretations that we make while we are involved in an activity. The intellectual and emotional component of actions is the main element of the human mind to achieve success in an activity and is an essential factor of professional performance.

What we think after an action is made up of the intellectual and emotional processing we do with our experience; it is a retrospective reflection on what we have experienced; a re-creation of the reality that existed during the action.

Authors in this field believe that reflection-on-action, that is, reflection after an action, contributes not only to improving our knowledge about what we did but also to improving the use of that knowledge during an action.

In other words, they believe that the practice of reflecting-on-action contributes to improving reflection-in-action and that this in turn contributes to improving professional performance.

Reflective practice contributes to improving professional performance in the following ways:

1)It improves professionals’ perception, in other words, their capacity to observe their own actions and initial results and to make timely improvements.

2)It permits professionals to identify the ideas and theories that they actually apply during work, critique them and compare them with the theories and ideas they thought they were applying. This enables professionals to systematically develop the theories with which they work.

3)It enables professionals to learn more about themselves, their reactions, values, ideas and methods. Thispermits professionals to take greater control of their career development.

While reflective practice is not a panacea, it effectively contributes to professional performance and development. In these first years of the 21st century, reflective practice will become increasingly important.

We will discuss how to develop our reflective practice skills in subsequent articles.

Experience generates knowledge.
Everybody knows that.

However, most of this knowledge is embedded in the action itself and is not acknowledged. Most people can walk, so they know how to walk, but it is also true that most of them are not aware about how they control their balance, how they harmonize the movements of their legs, their arms and their hips so as to remain in equilibrium. So we don’t know (we are not aware of) most of the knowledge that is embedded in our actions.

It is similar with our experience. As working we think almost all the time. We live an experience and as we are living it we have a great number of perceptions and thoughts. However most of our perceptions and thoughts remain unknown, or barely known. As time goes on, the knowledge acquired in the experience goes more and more unconscious. This unconscious knowledge is not completely lost; it will express itself as feelings and automatic reactions when we face situations that are similar to those we have lived before. But we are unable to develop this knowledge or to communicate it to other people.

Using the words of Donald Schön, the creator of the concept of reflective practice, we often think-in-action but seldom think-on-action (reflect on our actions).

A small part of the knowledge acquired in the actions and in the experiences we live is explicit, making it possible of being communicated, using words or symbols, to other people. But, most of the times, this conscious knowledge is fragmented. And, often their owners are not aware of their relevance for other people and for their community.

As the actions are being carried out our intelligence is focused in achieving success. We limit our observation to the factors we belief are critical to it success. We perceive very sharply the differences between the desired situation and the achieved situation, between the expected results of the actions and their effective results. However we barely perceive the part of the process that is working well.

During the action we are focused in getting results and we have no time for wondering why things happened exactly as they happened. We seldom learn from the part of the experience where surprises have not occurred. In most cases, successes are less understood than failures. In most cases successes are “blind spots” in our thinking.

This is not a criticism of the importance of successes. Successes like failures are huge factors of transformation of our lives and evolution of our selves but, in most cases, they do their job silently. In most cases we are not aware of what have happened, and why they happened.

To retrieve the knowledge acquired in our actions and experience is a very effective way of leveraging the experience and of making its knowledge accessible to our conscience and to other people. It is also an effective way of avoiding the reinvention of the wheel.

The reflective process is a way of reliving the experience without the urgencies of the moment, with new eyes and with a more open mind. It is a way of recreating the experience based on our memories. It is a way of gaining awareness of what really happened as we were struggling for achieving some results. If the reflective process is shared with other people, we have the opportunity to compare our perceptions and opinions with those of other participants or observers of the experience; and an opportunity for rethinking our opinions and beliefs.

The learning from reflection may occur a few seconds, minutes or hours after the action or much later. However if the reflection is nearer to the action the memory is fresher and more able to reconstruct the experience accurately. For learning from short term activities, from methodological procedures, from reactions to surprising situations, and so on, the reflection immediately after the action is the best way. In these cases, details are important, and the capacity for analyzing them is vital.

Many institutions have developed methods for reviewing the action almost immediately they have happened. The two main methods are: the “writing of journals”, made individually, and the “after action review”, made in groups. These two main methods can be used separately or in combination, and their use is expanding in organizations and institutions.

If the experience is longer than immediate actions, or the process studied requires long periods to express adequately its characteristics, the reflection should cover longer ranges of time (months, years and, in some cases, decades). In those cases the discovery of patterns turns out to be the most important sources of learnings. As time goes on the memory may lose details of the events and retrieving the facts presents particular challenges to participants.

The Center for Reflective Community Practice in MIT has developed a method for learning from the second kind of experience, the long range ones. CRCP have named this method “Critical Moments Methodology”.

That methodology has three main features:

1. A compass: the Inquiry Question
2. A lantern: the Critical Moments
3. A drill: the Stories.

The compass

The role of the Inquiry Question is to guide the mind in its efforts for retrieving the elements of the experience and for analyzing them in detail. The Inquiry Question is the motivating factor that generates energy and focus the intelligence throughout the process.

The lantern

After defining the Inquiry Question, the method begins a process of coming back to the experience, looking it through the eyes of a group of persons who have lived it under different roles and conditions. The experience is retrieved calling back its turning points, the points where the experience turned better or worse.

people who lived those events have had intense emotional experiences, positive and/or negative. Those emotional meanings make memory to record them stronger, enabling the mind to more effective in its effort for reconstructing the experience.

The drill

Once the Critical Moments are identified a small group is selected and people are invited to tell stories about those events. The dynamic of storytelling helps the memory to retrieve the details of those events enabling to do deep analysis besides the time already gone.

Finally, the knowledge is applied to improve results and performance of the people and their organizations. The learning experience helps them to broad their minds and to keep their knowledge alive and developing.

Boston, February, 22, 2006
Sebastiao Ferreira
617 276 5184
mendonca@mit.edu

People’s ability to renovate the concepts with which they think has become the main condition for changing the rhythm of current progress. The purpose of this series of articles is to promote conceptual learning.

Flexibility versus speed
We are living in an age characterized by a huge quantity of new events, in which discoveries reach us with increasing speed and the theories with which we understand the world develop and reveal their limits too quickly for most people to process.

In an age of accelerated change, of new approaches and new concepts, and of the superabundance of information, new learning strategies are needed to avoid being left behind.

Human beings have physical limits for speeding up and managing velocity. Living at a frenzied pace or thinking on the run are not practical responses to this accelerated evolution of knowledge. Instead, we must confront disruptive changes with audaciousness, serenity and energy. Today, disruptive changes are mainly changes in the concepts with which we think.

It is a matter of being in tune with the dissonance of the present in order to catch a glimpse of the future unfolding before us.

Therefore, the basic skill for living in an era of great change is not to increase our efforts but rather to develop the ability to intuit the emerging future, to visualize the complete puzzle when some pieces are still missing, to recognize the new concepts that will predominate and to let our old beliefs die.

The scarcest of resources
Nowadays, time is the scarcest of resources. It is also an irreplaceable, untransferable and unrenewable resource. In an age of rapid change, knowing how to manage this resource is of pivotal importance. Rather than moving faster every day, it is better to gain time by advancing into the future. If the challenge is to gain time, we have to gain the future. In the future, there are no limits on the time resource. Time in the future is limited only by our imagination.

By advancing into the future and gaining time there, we can stand out above the multitude of people who rush to compete against each other. We can travel freely down the empty highways. There we do not need to waste our energy competing; we can devote our intelligence to experimenting with our ideas, correcting their shortcomings and acquiring special skills that will give us advantages when competitors reach our neighborhood. More importantly, we will be inventing a world, building realities that do not exist today, creating an oasis in the middle of the desert and thereby helping to ensure that the future arrives earlier for all of us.

The roles of concepts
The concepts with which our mind operates have four key roles:

Gate filter or the lense of our perceptions

Concepts select which information is significant and reliable and which is not, that is, they filter the information that enters our thought processes and determine which information is simply noise. They control which information we perceive and which we do not.

The true borders of our universe are drawn by the interpretive and perceptive limits of our concepts. Concepts are like the beam of flashlights, enabling us to see only the part of the world they illuminate. All the rest continues in darkness or the unknown. In a world of information overload, the capacities and/or limitations of the concepts we use are more important than the diversity and richness of the information sources we access. The information universe our mind is capable of managing is determined mainly by the concepts we use to reason.

Control of current use

Concepts position the information in our mental frameworks and establish the general logic that processes and structures the synapse networks through which information will travel.

Concepts make information intelligible. Without concepts to process it, information does not make sense to the receiver, and it becomes nothing more than simple noise. For this reason, concepts are what give relevance to the information we use to think. Information that may not mean anything in a poor conceptual framework can become relevant when we incorporate new concepts into our thinking.

The possibility of future access

Concepts organize the information file in our memory, as well as its location or routes of access. Information that is clearly associated with our conceptual framework can be more easily identified and recovered. Information that does not have a clear connection with any concept is lost in the void, like ships at the bottom of the ocean.

Concentrating the accumulated wisdom of humanity

Concepts concentrate the wisdom of past and present generations, transcend time and provide us with the results of the most brilliant, creative minds of all generations. By successfully assimilating concepts, we are able to share in the world’s great advances and discoveries. Today we reason with the unit, zero, addition, square and cubic roots, and many other concepts that concentrate the discoveries or inventions of the great mathematicians.

Neurons and concepts
Neurons and concepts form a duo like that of hardware and software, computers and programs. Concepts are the mini programs that operate our neurons. Concepts determine the form of information processing and distribution. They are permanent sources for the interrelation of information. Almost automatically, their mind creates a network of connections with other concepts and knowledge.

The presence of a new concept in the brain produces new links between neurons or reactive areas that have not been used for many years. These new concepts connect previously disconnected areas of the mind and of thought. Conditions are thus created for the generation of thoughts and ideas that are surprising even for their author.

Without changing an individual’s chronological age, the renovation of concepts revitalizes the individual and generates new brain activity. People who manage to continually develop their concepts are able to keep their ideas and knowledge updated and can incorporate increasingly sophisticated knowledge. As a result, these people remain young for much longer. When we acquire concepts, we keep our thoughts dynamic and rejuvenate our brains.

According to neurologists, it is very difficult to change the network of relationships between the neurons of an adult person, in other words, it is not easy to reweave their synapse network. Nevertheless, people of any age can change the conceptual framework with which they reason. The results in terms of their thought processes are very similar. Individuals who renew their concepts can remain mentally young and gain time. Those who do not renew their concepts age rapidly. The signs of advancing time appear much more quickly in their minds and bodies.

Conceptual learning
Conceptual learning is a learning method in which concepts are exposed to the impacts of new data. It seeks to use the new knowledge to improve the concepts that organize our thoughts. This enables us to keep up with the dizzying pace of change and to assimilate the immense quantity of scientific and cultural knowledge currently produced. It enables the whole body of knowledge to evolve as a living unit.

People who use this learning method achieve that one single relevant information produces a succession of changes in the knowledge base and even in the form of thinking about the issue; with this method, individuals can use fragmentary, incomplete information and even intuition more effectively.

People who have conceptual sensibility are able to effectively renovate their knowledge. Every time individuals come into contact with new knowledge or are influenced by surprising information, their thoughts confront this knowledge with their conceptual framework and their hypotheses on the issue.

Only individuals capable of conceptual learning can accumulate knowledge in the current environment of commotion and surprises.

To be continued…

Notes about Nancy Dixon’s approach on knowledge sharing

Currently, every enlightened manager is aware of the requirement of updating his organizational knowledge and/or to reinventing it. But doing that doesn’t happen spontaneously.

For achieving updating their knowledge, organizations need to engage themselves in two kinds of activities:

Translate their ongoing experience into knowledge, creating team knowledge.Transfer that knowledge across time and space, leveraging it and crating organizational knowledge.

How a Team Creates Knowledge
Translating experience into (explicit) knowledge takes a certain amount of intention. It involves a willingness to reflect back on actions and their outcomes as moving forward. In an organization with a bias for action, like many companies and NGO, it may be a bit hard to develop the attitude for reflection and generate the time required for doing it adequately.

Constructing team knowledge requires disciplined behavior that is developed by participants who are intent on not only getting results but interested also in knowing how and why those results were got.

The level of conceptual sensibility at which the learning cycle is carried out can be a key factor to the value of the knowledge generated. If the analysis is focused in operational aspects, the new knowledge will be useful to improve the methods of work, but not for changing current approaches. When the institutional objective is to increase productivity, this kind of improvement may be a very important contribution.

But with a conceptual analysis the conclusions obtained may impact not only on the methods but also on the approaches used to create the methods, making possible to achieve qualitative or disruptive innovations.

Leveraging Common Knowledge
Time and energy are spent transferring knowledge from place to place. However, knowledge transference signifies a worthy increment in the organization’s knowledge asset. There are two main reasons for it:
1)Sharing knowledge is a way of multiplying the number of people who has it.
2)As teaching one learns.

According to Nancy Dixon, the knowledge team cycle may be expanded to the organization. She named this process as “leveraging common knowledge”. It is a good name, because transferring knowledge is a way of multiplying its users.

Nancy Dixon identified three steps in the process of knowledge transfer:
1)Selection of the system to be used.
2)Translation of knowledge to a form usable for others
3)Adaptation of knowledge by receivers.

She suggests three criteria for determining how the transference method will work in a specific situation.
1)Who the intended receiver of the knowledge is.
2)The nature of the task in terms of how routine and frequent it is.
3)The type of knowledge (tacit or explicit, simple or complex) is being transferred.

Who the intended receiver is
The group that is the source of knowledge and the group that is the intended receiver may be very similar or different, in terms of context. One of the ways that differing contexts can impact the transfer of knowledge is the “absorptive capacity” of the receiving team. “Absorptive capacity” means the capacity of the receiving group to identify, understand and incorporate the knowledge that is being contacted.

A lack of “absorptive capacity” in the receiving team is a significant barrier to knowledge transfer. The idea is that for a team to be able to learn a new knowledge, coming from another area or team of the organization, three conditions are required:

1)The ability to work together (shared expectations)
2)A basis of related knowledge (“absorptive capacity”)
3)A common language (a semantic media of transfer)

A typical error in designing transfer methods and instruments is to give more attention to the source than to the receiving group. And Dixon’s approach tries to avoid this common problem. Before selecting a transfer mechanism, it is important to find answers to these questions:
4)How similar are the task and the context of the receiving teams to those of the source team?
5)Do the receiving teams have the absorptive capacity to assimilate the knowledge the source team is emitting?

The nature of the task
The tasks may be frequent or infrequent, routine and no routine, and their transfer is decidedly affected by its nature.
1)A routine task (Administrative processes) has defined and standardized procedures that can be assimilated in an easiest way.
2)A no routine task (Strategic analysis) requires more clues and criteria to be applied to the emerging situations.

Is the task routine or no routine? Are there clear and fixed steps and procedures? Or alternatively, is each step a variable? If so, how variable are they?

The type of knowledge that is being transferred
The types of knowledge are a continuum from tacit to explicit.

1)Explicit knowledge can be laid out in procedures, formulas and diagrams.
2)Tacit knowledge is embedded in the experiences, abilities and thought of people (individuals and groups).

Cognitive scientists assure that tacit knowledge is very real, even if it is difficult to capture and express in documents, symbols or worlds. Tacit and explicit knowledge cannot be completely separated, tacit knowledge supports, complete and leverage explicit knowledge, and requires to work together to be transferred.

Five effective ways to transfer knowledge
Mrs. Dixon used three variables to defined categories of knowledge transfer:

1)The context in which the knowledge will be applied
2)The team that will apply the knowledge
3)The level of routine/complexity of knowledge

Based in these three variables, she conceived two groups of effective ways to transfer knowledge; for routine tasks (two modalities) and for non-routine tasks (three modalities).

Dixon’s approach is “pull” or offer oriented; however she does a real effort to understanding the requirements of the receivers. Her emphasis in the characteristics of the demand obliges us to pay attention to the complexities of knowledge transfer.

Her emphasis in language is very important. In my experience with knowledge emergence in groups one of the main challenges in facilitating knowledge transfer is to translate the expressions of some participants into the language of the others. To do this translation is one of the most important responsibility of a facilitator.

Although knowledge management in turning more and more to promoting the demand; the analysis of Dixon remains useful. Knowledge transfer is an effective way to multiply this asset. All organization needs to improve this area, and assimilate her contributions.

Reference: “Common Knowledge”, Nancy Dixon, …

Knowledge management has become fashionable. Many people are changing their vocabulary to keep up with the trend. Why has the idea of knowledge management become fashionable?

Is it an intellectual affectation?If this were the case, why have some of the most innovative companies inthe world (3M, Skandia, Xerox, IBM, etc.) and some think tanks and universities, recognized for their rigor and intellectual audacity, such as MIT, Harvard and others, undertaken studies to develop conceptual focuses and to create tools to assess and improve knowledge management systems?

Today we know that the capacity for learning more quickly than others is the key to success in 21st-century societies (Arie de Geus). We also know that intangible (mostly knowledge) assets make up most of a company’s commercial value (Thomas Stewart).

The great advantage of the approaches being developed around the idea of knowledge management is that they take an integral view of the different elements, which were previously addressed separately. These elements include information management, systematization, recovery of indigenous knowledge, organizational learning and creativity.

Knowledge management covers two major areas: 1)Knowledge processes
2)Policies that manage knowledge processes

There are three basic steps in the knowledge process:
1)The production or creation of knowledge, which covers all ways of creating knowledge.

The most common forms of knowledge creation are the following:
1)The explicitation of tacit knowledge 2)Experimentation
3)Creativity: artistic, technical, management or social
4)Reconceptualization
5)Different forms of research

2)The dissemination or transfer of knowledge, which involves determining how knowledge useful in a situation can be assimilated by others.

Some examples:
6)Exchange of experiences
7)Professional development, specialization or training courses.
8)Management of data portals and information in general.

3)The application of knowledge refers to the manner in which people think while they work and how theyuse the knowledge and techniques they learned earlier. This is currently the least known and least developed area of knowledge management. The best book on this topic, The Reflective Practitioner, was written 20 years ago by Donald Schon.

Policies to manage knowledge processes, or institutional conditions that facilitate knowledge processes, involve a variety of fields and tools. The different authors have approached these in very different ways.

McKinsey’s Jürgen Kluge groups them into seven broad categories:
1)Promotion of demand for knowledge
2)Management of the subjectivity of knowledge
3)Promotion of the transfer of knowledge
4)Management of the knowledge context 5)Management of the dynamics of the self-reinforcement of knowledge
6)Management of the obsolescence/aging of knowledge
7)Promotion of the creativity and spontaneity of knowledge production

Ikujiro Nonaka and George von Krogh mention five facilitating conditions:
1)Impart a vision of knowledge
2)Manage conversations
3)Mobilize activists (promoters) of knowledge
4)Create the right context
5)Globalize local knowledge

Etienne Wenger believes the most important aspects of knowledge management policies are creatingcommunities of practice and promoting knowledge projects.

As we can see, knowledge processes (creation, transfer and application) and the policies for knowledge management (in the different currents) refer to the rules of the relations between individuals, the creation of new stimuli, the force of new ideas and aspirations, etc. In other words, they refer to people and their relationships.

While the use of information management technologies is functional and useful, it represents only a small part of knowledge management. The most crucial aspect is what occurs in the mind of individuals and in the explicit and tacit rules of organizations and social groups.

To understand knowledge management, we must determine where key knowledge on poverty cycles can befound in order to develop processes to eliminate them. To meet our knowledge needs, we must identify the sources from which we assimilate our knowledge as well as those we exclude. We must determine what we learn and when. What perspectives and methods do we use to obtain knowledge and why? What are the ideas, paradigms and habits that guide us in these processes?

When tacit knowledge is being expressed it may acquire different forms: critical moments, timelines, flowchart, written story, storytelling, painting, music, poem, conceptual map, matrix, etc.

Why we select different ways of expressing our knowledge?

What are the implications of different receptacles for tacit knowledge uncovering?
How the receptacle, or the form of the knowledge, will influence its uses in the future?

All these issues have great importance for the effectiveness and productivity of tacit knowledge elicit and transformation and for its uses once it is made explicit.

The form acquired by the explicit knowledge will influence greatly the elements that will be better expressed and more understandable, among its contents. The receptacle or container molds many attributes of the knowledge contained, and the future uses it can have.

A story may describe many details of an event: the roles of the actors, the situations lived by them, etc. A flowchart is adequate for describing operative processes, a sequence of actions and the relation among their steps, but is not so adequate for describing the circumstances people live/feel as doing those steps. Matrixes are especially effective for describing relation between two or three variables, but can not contain much detail. Music describes emotions deeply connected with identity and language, and also may enhance the dramatic figures in a story, but is not so good for… Etc.

The cognitive receptacle organizes the knowledge in a particular way, influencing the availability of making future analyses of that knowledge. Matrixes are effective for exploring critical relations between two variables. Critical moments organize memory around events that have had great influence in the evolution of an experience and enable people to dig into them for discovering their meaning. Conceptual maps make easier to analyze logical consistence among the components of an idea. Etc.

Consequently, to select the adequate receptacle for expressing knowledge is determinant for achieving clarity of the elements one is most interested in.

The receptacle also influences, significantly, the level of abstraction of the knowledge contained in it.
A story may contain fragments of memorized events, requiring low level of abstraction or no abstraction at all for being constructed. One may go on through a story just following the memory process of happenings retrieving. Matrixes, however, require segmentation, classification and delimitation of the elements of knowledge they contain, without doing these previous cognitive operations it is almost impossible to organize knowledge in a matrix.

Besides determining many cognitive attributes of knowledge, the receptacle also project requirements to the methods used for uncovering the knowledge and for making it explicit. For each kind of containers the knowledge will need to have specific attributes and for generating this knowledge with those attributes, specific methods need to be applied. So the receptacle will determine the methods to be used for filling it adequatedly

The method for expressing tacit knowledge may have different levels of complexity and present different levels of difficulty for people use it. So the future use of the knowledge should be considered when selecting the receptacle and the method for finding it out and for expressing it.

It is necessary too to consider the way people have the knowledge organized in their minds, and the level of complexity or of abstraction they feel comfortable with.

Boston, 10feb2006