The Complete Guide to Knowledge Management: A Strategic Plan to Leverage Your Company's Intellectual Capital

Chapter 6. Managing Interactions for Knowledge Creation and Sharing

In this chapter you will:

Learn that knowledge creation and sharing occurs primarily through social interactions within communities.

Understand the manager's role in promoting interactions and removing personal and organizational barriers that hinder interactions as the basic means of knowledge management.

Gain specific tools for building the infrastructure and implementing the processes to promote these interactions.

Interactions via formal and casual meetings or via other numerous forms are the primary arena for knowledge creation and sharing. This is because by interacting with one another, people not only share ideas but also generate new ones that they would not have come up with if they were engaged in the tasks alone. Thus, we claim that managers should expend considerable effort toward facilitating these interactions: encouraging, promoting, and nurturing them.

The necessity of interactions is not obvious to everyone, as the following typical debate at Rafael shows:

CoP Meetings—a Must or a Waste of Time?

Michael, a department manager who is responsible for several sections, has been complaining that one of his section leaders "insists on wasting two hours a week on unnecessary section meetings." At these meetings, Michael complains, "All twenty busy section members spend precious time talking about who knows what, with no immediate benefit, while doing nothing to meet their own tight deadlines."

"But," Michael's ...