Knowledge Management and Organisational Culture

The construction of meaning is something we do without even being conscious of it. Out of the information of our senses and the experiences of daily life we are continually making sense. In recent years we have become much more aware of the influence of our culture on the way that we make sense of what is happening around us, and therefore also of the way that we respond.

Fons Trompenaars, following the work of Geert Hofstede, has been a leading figure in applying a model of culture to the way that multi- or trans-cultural organisations operate.

Beyond simply achieving a better understanding of colleagues and clients (would that it were that simple!) the thinking about culture has moved to look at the way that we deal with knowledge, and the way that we construct meaning.In a piece in KM Magazine Trompenaars asserts that "knowledge management is, or should be, fundamentally a cultural issue."

Data becomes meaningful when you structure it in a certain way - it becomes information. When you structure information, it becomes knowledge, and when you structure knowledge it becomes science,... It is the process of structuring that adds meaning. And since different cultures have different ways of structuring meaning, you can see that, by definition, knowledge management is a cultural construct.

In the article, Trompenaars goes on to say that effective knowledge management in an organisation depends crucially on the kind of culture within which it resolves dilemmas.

It is worth reading his exposition of these dilemmas which draw on his earlier work in Riding the Waves of Culture. A key point however is that there is far more to knowledge management, which has become an accepted part of business orthodoxy, than implementing programmes or installing systems. We need to think rather more deeply about the way that we do things, the way that we think about the world, and more deeply still about the kind of people we are.