I have been on temporary hiatus from this poor, neglected blog throughout the past semester. This is because I have been so busy at school, that all I want to do when I come home at night is: 1) Eat a delicious dinner, and 2) Allow my tired brain to be washed over with the mindlessness of prime-time television. Glorious, glorious television!

One interesting project that kept me busy was a presentation for the Housing Memory Student Conference, at the Faculty of Information. This conference was organized by two incredible students, Ania and Monica, who single-handedly organized the event, complete with 24 panelists, a brilliant keynote from information science superstar, Geoffrey Bowker (you can listen to the podcast of his presentation from the iSchool Podcast website here), and a roundtable with a whole bunch of really smart people, who discussed, “memory and its architectural manifestation in archives, libraries, museums, information systems and material and digital artifacts.” Can you IMAGINE doing all that while going to school full-time and working? Good lord.

Anyway: The overarching theme of “housing memory” was an attempt to facilitate broad discussion about how we store, preserve, and institutionalize memory – be it individual, collective, organizational, national, or cultural in nature. The topics were absolutely freaking fascinating, and I was literally excited to hear the presentations. I’m not normally the type of person who gets hyperactive about archival theory, ya know? But I moderated a panel on Memory and Conflict, which included discussion of the Pinochet regime and archives; Apartheid and museums; and libraries in times of war, and I could barely sit still because I was getting so excited. About ideas. And not House. It was awesome (find the abstracts for these presentations here).

My own topic (which, frankly, does get me pretty excited, but that’s just my dorkdom shining through), was part of a panel called, “Collecting, Sharing and… Forgetting?” in which I explored the role of organizational memory, and the challenge of effectively capturing and sharing “tacit knowledge” within companies. Tacit knowledge is the stuff you know, but can’t write down. It’s like riding a bike, or enjoying art – you might know how to do those things, but you can’t just tell someone how to do it. I argued that this type of knowledge – paramount to organizational success – can be exchanged through Communities of Practice, mentorships and storytelling. I was pretty much terrified throughout the presentation and don’t remember much of what I said/did, but it was an awesome experience, and the Q+A period afterwards was an excellent exchange that forced me to really think about my research in this area. I mean, I didn’t get to talk about the radical potential for emancipation through cultural and information institutions or anything. But still. T’was a lovely learning experience.

Those panellists who submitted their papers will be published in the Faculty of Information Quarterly next month (we’re slogging through the editorial process right now). Oh man, I really starting to feel like a real-life grown-up academic person or something!

Everyone who went to the conference said it was incredible; there was a buzz in the air of the Claude Bissell building, and everything went off without a hitch. It was a fantastic experience, and I really hope it becomes an annual event at the iSchool. Yay Ania and Monica!

The particular section I’m reading is an anecdote about a company called Gore – as in GoreTex, though they also make tons of stuff for the electronics industry, health care and the military (and here I thought they only made rain jackets). Gore never has more than 150 people at a single plant; if a plant grows beyond that, they buy a new plant and split the group in half. The founder, Bill Gore, noticed that things get clumsy at a hundred and fifty, and that in small plants every part of the process for designing and making and marketing a given product is subject to the same group scrutiny to ensure a constant climate of innovation and sharing, and a holistic understanding of production. There is a common relationship among workers so that they are constantly moving forward and a sort of “peer-pressure” develops which ensures everyone is working toward a unified goal.

I don’t really care about making billions of dollars in the armaments business (I’m in library school so that’s obvious). But what I found really interesting about this story is its obvious connection to notions of knowledge management (KM, if you will).

I wrote a paper on knowledge management for a class this past year, and I found the topic very interesting; When Gore talks about the need to foster small, close-knit teams of employees, what he is essentially concerning himself with is the successful sharing of tacit knowledge. Formally speaking, tacit knowledge is defined as knowledge that cannot be codified but is paramount to the mastery of a particular skill. How do you create instructions on how to enjoy a play, or win a baseball game? It’s difficult for us to express because it can’t be clearly verbalized as a cohesive set of rules. There are heaps of neat examples of how companies have created particular environments for their employees to foster and cultivate knowledge sharing. I read a book called “The Knowledge-Creating Company” by Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi – a KM classic – for my paper, and liked the following passage about Japan’s big auto companies’ approach to knowledge sharing:

“Japanese companies… recognize that the knowledge expressed in words and numbers represents only the tip of the iceberg. They view knowledge as being primarily “tacit” – something not easily visible and expressible. Tacit knowledge is highly personal and hard to formalize, making it difficult to communicate or to share with others. Subjective insights, intuitions, and hunches fall into this category of knowledge. Furthermore, tacit knowledge is deeply rooted in an individual’s action and experience, as well as in ideals, values or emotions he or she embraces.”

Companies like Honda have tea rooms where employees are obligated to sit with members of other divisions and chat. Just sip tea and talk to one another. The assumption is that engineers and marketers and designers sharing information about work ensures that everyone knows what the other is doing; the money flows because the product is a well-orchestrated, focused effort from the entire group; a coordination of all their perspectives… And we all know how Japanese automakers are doing.

Here’s an example of how to ignore tacit knowledge sharing, ultimately to your company’s detriment:

When IBM entered a time of needed innovation to ensure their future success in the IT market, the chairman of the company circulated a memo telling employees to “stay way from the water coolers and get back to work” (Doesn’t he sound like a gem). The cultural norm of being at one’s desk doing productive tasks was trying to be imposed on a group of workers who were attempting to collaboratively discuss potential solutions to IBM’s trouble. This casual exchange could have been of much greater benefit to the company than formal work tasks, but in a company with a narrow understanding of what productivity and work look like, management couldn’t recognize the positive outcomes of informal discussion.

You see this type of problem all the time; my boyfriend just changed jobs and his(now) former employer admitted that his entire project has been somewhat derailed because nobody bothered to have him share his knowledge – his tacit understanding of how to do things and do them efficiently, only came about from trial and error, and when he left, his knowledge went with him. Or on student council, where we discovered that a giant document we had drafted had already been written by the student council of a few years ago… and that we knew the people who’d written it! Hours of effort and time could have been saved if there had been better efforts at knowledge transfer and knowledge management. I’d be really interesting in learning how to cut down on these information silos in a workplace, particularly in a library – I hope to learn more about it at FIS and hopefully in my professional career as well!

If you’re interested in reading up on KM, here are some good reads (and they’re easy, not hard!):

Davenport, T. and Prusak, L. (1998). Working knowledge: How organizations manage what they know. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Polanyi, M. (1962). Personal knowledge towards a post-critical philosophy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago.

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