Mark McElroy’s paper Understanding ‘The New Knowledge Management’ advocates the use of knowledge management to help create the open enterprise – a kind of corporate equivalent of Karl Popper’s idea of the open society
This paper sets out McElroy’s vision of a new form of KM which focuses more on the conditions for the production of organisational knowledge than what he calls “first generation KM”, which was concerned mainly with distribution and dissemination. He describes ‘The New Knowledge Management’ (TNKM) as a fallibilist approach influenced by Karl Popper’s notion of Critical Rationalism, in contrast to what he calls “justificationist” first generation KM (typified by Nonaka and Takeuchi’s book, “The Knowledge Creating Company”, that sees management within an organsiation as the final arbiter of truth – a position he suggests is partly responsible for corporate scandals such as Enron and WorldCom

“What we need, in other words, are operating environments that can help to quality-control the content of our ideas, so that all of us, not just managers, can be held more intellectually accountable. For obvious reasons, I and my friend and colleague, Joseph M. Firestone, refer to this vision of the intelligent enterprise as the Open Enterprise 9, named appropriately after Karl Popper’s conception of the ‘Open Society.’”

He goes on to espouse a model for supporting the Open Enterprise through supporting self-managed and self organising learning, encouraging Knowledge Claim Evaluation, whilst removing management’s attempts to control learning at all levels within the organisation and synchronising policies to support and reinforce positive learning behaviours. Naturally enough, he locates this work within his own pre-existing model of knowledge production and dissemination that he refers to as the Knowledge Life Cycle
His policy tools to achieve this are divided into structural and operational areas
Structural Dimensions:

• Ethodiversity: The degree of diversity in values and worldviews held by members of an organization – impacts the range of perspectives and experiences available to an organization as it seeks to detect problems and opportunities, and to search for solutions to them.
• Connectedness: The density or degree of connectivity between individuals and groups in organizations – impacts the extent of interactions between people and the velocity of information flow.
• Community Formation: The extent to which an organization encourages and supports the self-organized formation of learning-related groups or ‘communities of learning, practice,’ etc. – a pre-condition for group learning (see below).

Operational Dimensions

• Individual Learning: The extent to which individuals are free to pursue learning agendas of their own choosing – impacts rate and quality of organizational innovation.
• Group Learning: The extent to which groups or ‘communities’ are free to pursue learning agendas of their own choosing – impacts rate and quality of organizational innovation.
• Knowledge Production: The extent to which formal and informal learning at the level of authority structures (e.g., management and governance) are open to inspection (transparency) by, and participation (inclusiveness) from, employees and other stakeholders – impacts rate and quality of organizational innovation.
• Knowledge Sharing: The extent to which individual and organizational knowledge is accessible to stakeholders who may want or need it, as well as the quality of knowledge diffusion in the organization – impacts business-level knowledge use and performance, and the capacity of stakeholders to recognize and detect problems.
• Knowledge Entitlement: The extent to which title to, and benefits from, intellectual property and other forms of intellectual capital are shared with employees and other stakeholders who contribute to their production – impacts problem solving and innovation behaviors by tapping into intrinsic motivation at the level of individuals and groups.

McElroy provides suggestions and some working examples of each policy approach, and to assist implementation he highlights the cultural elements that need to be in place (such as a culture of openness and rational dialogue) and some underpinning technologies, such as the Enterprise Knowledge Portal. On the subject of technology, he also criticises KM technology’s obsession with identifying “best practice” and then using management authority to force its use and re-use throughout the organisation regardless of context, and in a way that accepts no refutation. TNKM, he argues, can support a richer tapestry of claim and meta-claim (e.g. counter claims based on failed re-use in a speciic context) that is less prone too failure and more in keeping with the way people operate within organisational structures
At a time when the philanthropist speculator George Soros believes he can do more for the world by funding regime change in the USA rather than supporting open society initiatives in the former Eastern bloc, the Open Society / Open Enterprise analogy is an interesting one. With weakening multilateral institutions and increasingly powerful and barely regulated corporates becoming involved in the sub-contracting of key public services including identity management, the electoral process and even war fighting, it seems logical that we should try to ensure that these organisations become more open and transparent in the way they operate
McElroy’s practical ideas are clearly more focused on improving the efficiency and productivity of organisations, and in that respect they contain some useful pointers, but they also imply wider cultural issues about how companies operate that should concern all of us. The paper is a good intro to his overall approach, if somewhat limited in scope
See also: “The Open Enterprise” published by the KMCI.