How can a climate be established to foster trust, engagement in learning, and knowledge sharing in groups of individuals? The authors of the Texas study (Jarvenpaa et al., 1998) report that in addition to having a propensity to trust, virtual teams can attain trust by developing high levels of initiative, having a results orientation, and conducting their work genuine integrity. Flores and Solomon argue that “trust is the product of our relationships” (1998, p. 224).
In other words, trust is not merely a “thing” that appears, they say, but a feeling that is cultivated by people taking responsibility to be trustworthy and trusting. Just as individuals can cultivate love (loving and being loveable) by acting in a loving way through small thoughtful gestures, they can also act in a trusting manner and instill trust by doing careful, timely, and quality work, by being responsive and fair in decision making and communication (Flores &
Solomon, 1998; Husted, 1998; Shaw, 1997). Acting in a trusting way engenders trust just as sharing knowledge helps in the building of knowledge and in creating a learning organization. According to Shaw (1997), organizational trust can come about by
• Using creative ways to elicit and present information,
• Presenting opportunities for the ongoing development of knowledge, and
• Having an environment that tolerates and encourages risk taking within the values of the organization.
Without a trusting environment, though, few are willing to take risks, and one could argue that without trust, employees would be less likely to even seek out information from others unless it is absolutely necessary. Knowledge sharing, then, would be highly unlikely.
5.1 Using Creative Ways to Elicit and Present Information:
Case 1—Sharing Knowledge Through Caf´e Conversation and Drama
One organization that serves as an exemplar of creative approaches to sharing knowledge is the Skandia Future Center, a division of the Swedish insurance company Skandia, created in 1996 by Leif Edvinsson in Stockholm in order to help the company break out of its current ways of thinking. Skandia is known for its innovative knowledge elicitation and dissemination practices.
In one instance the company organized intergenerational teams that met in a “knowledge caf´e” format. Each team had coffee and a laptop computer
available. They talked about the future of the insurance industry with one person keying in notes on the laptop; the notes were then transmitted to a central source. When all the notes were compiled, the company representatives gave them to a company of actors who then created a play that incorporated the essence of all the teams’ ideas. The play was presented at a company wide meeting, a meeting that was memorable by all accounts. Employees are said to have remembered the accounting of their knowledge caf´e long after they may have recalled any report, memo or printed material. Surely, the organizers of the knowledge caf´e must have trusted that the employees and executives of Skandia would accept such a different approach to conversation and knowledge exchange because it was risky to present a “report” in such an unusual format (McNurlin & Sprague, 2002).
5.2 Presenting Opportunities for Ongoing Development of Knowledge: Case 2—Finding Knowledge Objects Through Metadata and Taxonomies
In large organizations it is common for different groups to perform similar tasks but not to share a common vocabulary. For example, marketing staff might domarket research, the legal department might performdue diligence, and the corporate librarians might provide updated competitive intelligence.
Although there are slight differences in connotation in each of these activities, there is also overlap in the information retrieved and results found, but the staff members might not communicate with each other or even know what the other departments are doing. If these different departments wished to exchange information and learn from each other, it could be useful if they spoke each other’s language, and in fact, if they are sharing their findings on an Intranet or internal Web portal, it would be useful to have a common language, especially one that could assist in metadata and indexing of knowledge objects.
In representing knowledge and knowledge objects in an organization the taxonomy can be used to good advantage, especially for re-use of knowledge objects. A taxonomy is a part of an organization’s information architecture that categorizes the texts, digital files, narratives, interview transcripts, images, and other objects that are stored in an information or knowledge repository. This fulfills the dual needs of creating a common and shared vocabulary that allow individuals and groups to effectively retrieve files and to be able to trust the system where objects are stored. Without a taxonomy or index language, it is likely that potentially useful objects might be in the system but never be found. Data can be defined as a “set of discrete, objective facts about events. . .and is most usefully described as structured records of transactions” (Davenport & Prusak, p. 2), distinguished from information in that the latter “has meaning. . .. Not only does it potentially shape the receiver; it has a shape: it is organized to some purpose” (p. 5).
Knowledge derives from information through the processes of comparison,
understanding consequences, establishing relationships, communicating and sharing with others about the information and gaining their insights and perspectives (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995; Davenport & Prusak, 2000; von Krogh, Ichijo, & Nonaka, 2000). Further differentiation of knowledge from information can be based upon justified true belief on the part of the knower, and the critical importance of context in the establishment of knowledge, that is, information is relatively context free whereas knowledge is totally context dependent (Blair, 2002). The dynamic, contextually based nature of knowledge is captured in Davenport and Prusak’s definition:
Knowledge is a fluid mix of framed experience, values, contextual information, and the expert insight that provides a framework for evaluating and incorporating new experiences and information. It originates and is applied in the minds of knowers. In organizations, it often becomes embedded not only in documents or repositories but also in organizational routines, processes, practices and norms (1998, p. 5).
Since knowledge is built on information, it is critical that organizational members are able to access that information. Without a comprehensive, current, accurate taxonomy that is made visible and easy to access, information can languish and go unused. Most KM technology systems are complex and multi-faceted, and a high quality taxonomy can engender trust because it helps in the findability of information. In contrast, when users do not find what they need because access points are not plentiful nor sensibly assigned, trust is compromised. As Denise Bedford of the World Bank Group explains, “Understanding the various types and uses of taxonomies is important to building a fully functional KM system” (2004, p. 219). She goes on to claim, “Knowledge management architectures that are built around well-defined taxonomies will prove sustainable and extensible as technologies advance to be effective, maintainable” (2004, p. 222).
These taxonomies serve as catalogs or indexes for the information that can feed into systems that are necessary for mission critical work. They are the provenance of the librarian or information professional who has studied the organization of knowledge and information cataloging, and also dependent on the subject matter experts to whom the specialists turn for grounded understanding of the domain-specific knowledge that underlies any useful, and consequently utilized, taxonomy. Renata Gorman, a New Jersey based knowledge management consultant who has worked in several large U.S. financial organizations, says that the taxonomies and metadata used to organize portions of knowledge objects, can function well in online learning programs where organizational members access the learning systems. One file might be connected to several different learning modules, and the metadata is the thread that connects similar concepts and ties together topics that relate to each other (Gorman, 2004).
5.3 An Environment that Tolerates and Encourages Risk Taking:
Case 3—The Mixed Message Given by Expertise Locators
There are many factors that create an environment of trust within an organization from open communication and honesty to humane personnel policies, and Shaw (1997) argues that encouraging risk-taking and experimentation is also necessary. In a business setting decisions often need to be made quickly, but if there isn’t support for risk-taking, managers and others will be stymied by the fear of being punished for making the wrong decision. Shaw says,
. . .high-trust organizations give people the freedom to fail and then
deal effectively with the failure when it occurs. The ability to get through difficult times, to support people when they are vulnerable, can build trust as much as anything else does (p. 149).
Although everyone will make a mistake at some time or another, we hope to soften the difficulties by minimizing problems and decreasing the likelihood that mistakes will be made. One way to establish an environment of trust is to help people find others in the organization who can give advice and offer suggestions in the face of new tasks or new projects. The traditional way is to create organizational “yellow pages” when the employee is first hired by having a questionnaire that can be completed with the new person’s interests and expertise, and then the information on the form can be entered into a database so that organization members can contact each other. This system is fine, as far as it goes, however, people develop new interests and knowledge areas as their tenure progresses, and the yellow pages can reach obsolescence quickly, thus limiting its usefulness.
“Expertise locators,” software that dynamically finds areas of expertise by scanning documents, e-mail, and electronic discussions, is a more dependable way to locate someone who can be consulted for focused advice. Researcher Kate Ehrlich at Viant Corporation points out that sometimes the best answer to sharing knowledge is finding a trusted advisor through an expertise locator because the locator can help “individuals develop better awareness of ‘who knows what” (Ehrlich, p. 139). When an individual acts within the supportive advice of a more experienced individual, the worker feels less isolated and is acting in concert with an organizational expert.
The irony here, though, is that even though finding a trusted advisor is desirable, the way expertise locators work is to “look over the shoulder” of workers by having the system scan personal communication, meeting minutes, e-mail, other online discussion, presentation slides, reports, and manuscripts, in other words, whatever exists on the hard drive. It is commonly known that e-mail in organizations, especially in industry, is monitored, but the practice of searching all of someone’s files and communication being searched for “expertise” is somewhat disconcerting, and seems to belie an environment of trust. So, one could argue that the yellow pages approach to listing expertise
areas, with all its imperfections, is preferable to standard expertise locators.
Yellow pages can always be updated, even though it takes time and money to do so.
In summary, the kind of organization that cultivates trust is one that elicits and presents information, encourages the ongoing development of knowledge and learning, and fosters risk-taking. A learning organization with active knowledge sharing is the ideal, but who shall organize information that comes from meetings such as those in the knowledge caf´e described above? And who shall organize the taxonomies that make artifacts accessible and findable?
In addition, where will the expertise profiles originate, and who will manage the information and their currency? One answer to these questions might be the information service staff. The next section of this paper is a discussion of research that studied knowledge management in large organizations in New Jersey and the findings that relate to trust and the role of information professionals in creating a knowledge sharing environment.