This chapter aimed to explore the potential of email for supporting inquiring organiza- tions and enhancing wisdom. We first reviewed how knowledge can be created when solving problems and making decisions in organizations during social processes involv- ing discourse and circumstances in which this may lead to the enhancement of wisdom.
In particular, the chapter highlights the value of a cycle of convergence and divergence
in discourse for the promotion of learning and wisdom and the wisdom of maintaining an attitude of fallible knowing throughout knowledge creation and decision making. We also reviewed key concepts of inquiring organizations, highlighting the influences of different inquiry modes for guiding knowledge creation and decision making and introducing a conceptual model for supporting inquiring organizations (Figure 4) that incorporates the wisdom enhancement principle of cycles of convergence-divergence.
We reported an empirical study of knowledge creation in email from which emerged some of the key characteristics of inquiring systems. More specifically, we observed a cyclic knowledge creation life cycle (Figure 5) that highlights cycles of qualification (conver- gence) and combination (divergence), suggesting that wisdom may be enhanced through this email-enabled knowledge creation cycle.
The potential of email for supporting pragmatic collaborative knowledge creation, learning, and wisdom enhancement has been highlighted in this chapter. In looking for ways to promote the valuable patterns found, the structuring of collaborative spaces with negotiation discourse templates is one avenue to explore (Ing & Simmonds, 2000;
Turoff et. al, 1999). A simpler idea is to train employees in the types of conversations that best promote learning, wise decisions, and wisdom in general. Leadership provides yet another path for influencing domains by modifying the complexity of knowledge work, thus encouraging different patterns of discourse.
We saw that the interplay of perspectives enabled the coordination and integration of tacit knowledge between organizational participants who, possessing only specialized knowledge, otherwise tended to remain isolated and unable to contribute to the larger goals of the organization. Participants also integrated their tacit knowledge with codified knowledge in knowledge trails and internal repositories. These findings are important because, as noted earlier, OM is piecemeal, and its fragments require integration or coordination, while it is generally difficult to access the subjective component of OM.
An emerging key role for people possessing integrated knowledge was highlighted by the study. Such people can be termed knowledge integrators, and their increasing importance for collaborative learning and decision making suggests a shift away from valuing specialist knowledge toward valuing people with interdisciplinary and “big picture” understanding.
In closing, we remark an increasing need, in our times, for wisdom. The way forward may lie in giving people voices that are genuinely heard, as people strive to achieve their individual goals, together. This chapter has suggested that it is in the resulting symbiosis of individual ideas and judgments that wisdom, so greatly needed, may well be found.
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