Knowledge is Information, transformed

September 28, 2009

Post filed in Tao of Management - With keywords business, information, knowledge, memory, Tao of Management

If Information is "Data, correlated" then Knowledge is "Information, transformed". The transformation from Information to Knowledge is an exercise of the brain that, once understood, could shed light on the elusive process of capturing the tacit knowledge of business and corporate smarts.

Information is not Knowledge

The former is interesting but only the latter is useful. You want more Information to build up and fine-tune your Knowledge, but ultimately you want more Knowledge to make better decisions. For a clear explanation of the difference between the two, the readers are urged to read What Can You Capture? by Chuck Musciano on his blog The Effective CIO.

In a previous post, The Peril of Data-driven Knowledge, I have made similar observations about the difference between "interesting" and "useful":

"… there are too many performance measurements that inundate the executive dashboards today without providing any insight about how these pieces of Data/Information/Knowledge may help the business moving forward. They are known as the lag indicators by the initiated, the least useful pieces of Knowledge. So the next time that you hear someone expounds the virtue of Knowledge, ask yourself whether or not that kind of Knowledge is relevant to the business at hand or just a bunch of gobbledygooks to impress people."

In his post, Chuck also deplored the common attempt to "capture" Knowledge similar to the way that Data and Information are captured, albeit with more sophisticated tools such as Business Intelligence and the like. He called this type of data-driven knowledge "rote knowledge". He suggested that:

"The ease of data capture and the improvements in deriving information imply that the next level, knowledge capture, is possible and even easy. I contend it is not; while some rote knowledge may be captured, really important knowledge is only learned over time through continuous exposure to a master, much like a traditional apprenticeship. Our fascination with tools misleads us into thinking that there is a tool for everything; I don’t know that there is a tool for true, deep knowledge capture."

While mostly agreeing with his view, I have a slighly different opinion which I have expressed as a comment to his post:

"There is a tool for true, deep knowledge capture: our brain. It’s the universal tool that let all of us learn how to drive or acquire “deep” knowledge. It does so by identifying and classifying patterns of recognition. In an organization, the challenge of capturing business/corporate Knowledge (i.e. patterns of success) resides in the fact that captured Information (interesting) are not systematically processed, consistently evaluated, and publicly recognized as instances of success (useful). Otherwise, the staff (or to be more specific, their brains) would “know” how to solidify these instances into deep Knowledge over time."

When re-reading the comment, I realized that it was so cryptic to the point of incomprehensible, so that a follow-up is almost required. This post is my attempt to expand on it – and share with you some additional thoughts on Knowledge.

Knowledge = Information, encoded and wired

Let me first start with a disclaimer: I am not a trained scientist. My studies of the brain and the mind are limited and superficial. They nevertheless serves as the basis for my point of view (PoV) on Knowledge Acquisition and I take full responsibility for it. However, I am not going to provide an exhaustive bibliography to bolster my PoV. After all, this is a personal blog post, not a research paper.

In order to understand how the brain can be an effective tool to capture Knowledge, we should know how and how well the brain makes its acquisition, storage and retrieval. Each of the following 3 statements summarizes my understanding of each process:

Our brain acquires Knowledge through a progressive Intake process: it first registers the information in the active (also called short-term) memory. If the brain perceives this information important or useful, it will move the information to the long-term memory. At the same time, it will create a new neural network (a complex collection of synapses and neurotransmitters) in the cerebral cortex for this new piece of Information. This new neural network is the memory location of the Information and a node in an existing and larger network which is the brain itself. At this point, we can say that the Information is encoded (in long-term memory) and wired (in a neural net). It is the genesis of Knowledge.
There are 2 types of long-term memory: declarative or explicit memory which contains the Knowledge of WHAT (episodic memory for events, semantic memory for facts) and non-declarative or procedural (implicit) memory which contains the Knowledge of HOW [Ref. Joaquin M. Fuster, Memory in the Cerebral Cortex, 1995]. There are different theories about where these different types of long-term memory are stored. One theory talks about a "multi-stage, multi-store" concept, whereby the Information is passed from a shallow to a deeper region of memory depends on its persistence (Does it sound familiar to those of you involved in the Information Lifecycle Management – ILM – concept?). Another one, the one that I subscribe to, argues that the locations of these stores are not important, what is important is the capability of the brain to know where the Information – in plural - are (Again, does it also sound familiar to those of you involved with DBMS, SaaS, or Cloud Computing?).
The effectiveness of memory recall (or Knowledge retrieval) depends on the "level of processing" of the initial encoding, i.e. how deep the information has been originally processed. The deeper the encoding process, the better memory recall later on [Ref. Dr. Fergus I.M. Craik]. Depth of processing is a function of familiarity, specificity of processing, duration of exposure, etc. (See also Levels-of-processing effect for a better description of these variables). It also depends on the so-called "elaborative rehearsals" or associations between the new information in the short-term memory and the stored information in the long-term memory. The more associations are made at the acquistion phase, the deeper its encoding (which creates a richer neural net) and the easier its retrieval from memory.

What all this mean is that, strictly speaking, Knowledge cannot be captured at all, just like Chuck Musciano said earlier on; and that when I said the Brain is the tool to do such thing, I meant to say that the brain captures the Information in this complex memory-encoding, neural net-wiring process so that when retrieved, the Information is somehow magically transformed into pertinent, relevant, and useful Knowledge.

However, there are enough pointers here for those of you who wish to capture the tacit knowledge of business from the brains of those hard-to-replaced experienced workers who may walk out the door one day and never return.

How to best capture tacit Business/Corporate Knowledge?

The first thing to do is to put aside any thought of capturing the knowledge through automated and data-driven methods. This kind of Knowledge created is shallow and its usefulness is not worth the investment. It’s better to focus the corporate effort on creating a learning environment conducive to information transformation, i.e. similar to the way the brain functions; and on guiding the employees through their own knowledge encoding. You can do that by:

Making the process of identifying useful Information clear and timely - Whenever there is an Event (episodic memory) or a Fact (semantic memory) or a Process (procedural memory) or a Project (a combination of all these) that is desirable to capture for eternity, it should be publicly and timely recognized as such, i.e. as an "instance of success". Leave it to the employees to "encode" that piece of information into their memory stores. Naturally, the more such instances of success are known publicly, the more chances for the employees to make "elaborative rehearsals" and deepen the encoding process.
Making the selection of useful Information consistent and non-ambiguous - Make sure that the instances of success exhibit some common or shared attributes. There is nothing worse than selecting ones with contradictory attributes. Better yet, point out the so-called "universal truth" from these instances so that a "pattern of success" could be created. Leave it to the employees to recognize the "familiarity" of such event/fact/process/project.
Helping the employees refresh their memories - Create corporate legends and stories out of these instances of success. Make them visible and recognizable everywhere. There must be at least 3 stories of success for each type of business knowledge worth capturing (e.g. closing a deal with a difficult prospect, implementing a new technology in an impossible time frame, etc.). Leave it to the employees to pick the right one to complement their inner memories.

You will see that gradually, the employees will make better decisions as if they have somehow acquired the "secret sauce" of success that is elusive to them before.

Conclusion

Most Knowledge, especially the tacit one, cannot be hard-coded. We need to rely on the people (and their brains) to learn from past and present Events/Facts. The success of an organization in preserving this Knowledge resides in its capability to have, at any given time, enough people with such knowledge (or people with the capacity to acquire quickly such knowledge), regardless of the inevitable turnover. In turn, the capacity of acquiring tacit knowledge depends on the Leadership of the ornanization to carefully create and maintain a corporate environment where examples of successful Events and Facts, as well as desirable Behaviours and Proceses, are clearly selected, timelely communicated and prominently displayed. Let the employees take care of the rest.