Critical Systems as a Way to Manage Knowledge -- Fei GAO, August 5, 2002

46th Annual Meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS), Shanghai, P.R. China, August 2-6, 2002.

Sunday, August 5, 2002, 11:10 a.m., Critical Systems Track

This digest was created in real-time during the meeting, based on the speaker's presentation(s) and comments from the audience. These should not be viewed as official transcripts of the meeting, but only as an interpretation by a single individual. Lapses, grammatical errors, and typing mistakes may not have been corrected. Questions about content should be directed to the originator. These notes have been contributed by David Ing (daviding@systemicbusiness.org) at the IBM Advanced Business Institute ( http://www.ibm.com/abi ).

School of Knowledge Science, JAIST

Agenda

• What is CST
• What is KM?

CST as a way to manage knowledge.

• Have many types of knowledge:
  • knowledge of being
  • ... of doing
  • ... of society
  • ... of humanity
• in various disciplines

CST (understanding from Jackson)

• View the research object as a system.
• See the model and process of modeling, and the environment.

CSI and TSI (Floor ∓ Jackson)

• Three commitments:
  • Critical and social awareness
  • Human emancipation or improvement
  • Pluralism at both theoretical and methodological levels.
• TSI three phases:
  • Creativity
  • Choice
  • Implementation
• Want to focus on the right questions, right objects

TSI (Jackson, 2000)

• Tasks
• Tools
• Expected outcomes

What is knowledge?

• What the knower knows and gains without any judgement -- to oneself.
• What is known and gained (with judgement) -- to others
• Justified true beliefs (philosophical) or truth -- to all.

Knowledge in western philosophy

• Epistemology: nature, origin and reliability of knowledge that justifies true beliefs
  • Deduction, induction or synthsis.
• Polanyi Post-Critical philosophy

Knowledge in social theory

• Daniel Bell: a set of organized statement of facts, ideas or thing objectively known.
• Nico Stehr in network society: contemporary science
• Drucker: in the knowledge economy, is effective or "specialized knowledge"

Knowledge in IT:

• Beckman: reasoning about information and data
• Turban: organized or analyzed information
• Davenport & Prusak: contextual information
• Boisot: information extracted from data
• Earl, 1994:
  • Data from events
  • Information is interpreted from data
  • Knowledge is tested from information.

To economic organizations, knowledge has two levels:

• Personal knowledge: skills and ability one possesses, plus one's value.
• Drucker's specialized knowledge,

Organizational knowledge: static substance knowledge and dynamic process knowledge

• Static substance knowledge == cookbook, manual, objective, theoretical, public
• Dynamic process knowledge == cooking, operation, subjective, technical, commodity

SSK:

• Visionary knowledge
• Objective knowledge
• Generic knowledge

DPK (related to Human Activity System)

• High-autonomy Human Activity Systems (Defined Mission)
• Autonomy (Defined Goals)
• Deterministic (Defined Process)

KM is to manage the activities of knowledge workers.

• Purpose to mine organizatoinal intellectual assets.

From the system methodology approach, need different types of methods to support the different types of knowledge.

• [refer to multiple, packed tables]
• Organizational SSK: potential approaches are more scientific

Problem contexts in three dimensions:

• Unitary / pluralism
• Human activity systems
• Knowledge managers vs. knowledge workers.

Conclusion from Flood ∓ Jackson:

• Can't use a super-method. Can't revert to trial and error. Need to choose a method.

Questions

Use of knowledge in planning? Early in the project, need to motivate individual knowledge.

• This process is inclouded in the High-Autonomy Human Activity System.

There are some Dynamic Process Knowledge that doesn't rely on information, e.g. piano playing which is training. Do we need something that is not hard systems thinking, soft systems thinking, or critical systems thinking, that emphasis the embodied knowledge.

• The distinction between data, information and knowledge is from Earl.