The rise of knowledge management
In the 1990s, as Peter Drucker's "knowledge society" took shape, knowledge came to be seen as a firm's key resource, ahead of land, labor and capital. Knowledge management turns members' experience and know-how into organizational assets and links them to new products and services. An approach centered on information systems developed alongside one centered on people and organizational culture.
Tacit and explicit knowledge
The philosopher Michael Polanyi (1966) wrote that "we can know more than we can tell," introducing tacit knowledge. Nonaka built on this to distinguish two forms of knowledge.
- Tacit knowledge: knowledge acquired through experience and hard to put into words, such as a craftsperson's skill or a salesperson's feel for a customer.
- Explicit knowledge: knowledge expressed in words and numbers, such as manuals, documents and databases, and easily transferred.
The four modes of the SECI model
- Socialization (tacit → tacit): sharing experience through apprenticeship, observation and working together.
- Externalization (tacit → explicit): articulating tacit knowledge as concepts and models through metaphor, analogy and dialogue. Nonaka saw this as the heart of knowledge creation.
- Combination (explicit → explicit): gathering and systematizing documents and data into new explicit knowledge, supported by information systems and tools such as ERP.
- Internalization (explicit → tacit): learning by doing, so that manuals and training become an individual's new tacit knowledge.
Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) cite Matsushita's home bread-maker. A developer learned the dough-twisting motion from a hotel baker (socialization), expressed it as the concept of "twisting stretch" (externalization), built it into design specifications (combination), and team members in turn absorbed it (internalization).
The knowledge spiral and ba
The four conversions repeat and widen from individual to group, organization and inter-organizational levels, forming the knowledge spiral. Nonaka and Konno (1998) called the shared context in which knowledge emerges ba, with originating, dialoguing, systemizing and exercising ba suited to each mode. They also proposed middle-up-down management, in which middle managers bridge top management's vision and frontline reality.
Significance and critiques
The SECI model shifted attention from storing knowledge to creating it and, together with work on the learning organization, became a basic framework of organizational learning research. Critics note that it rests on cases from Japanese corporate culture, which limits generalization, and that assuming tacit knowledge can be fully converted into explicit knowledge simplifies Polanyi's original idea. In practice, knowledge management systems often fail without a culture that rewards sharing.
References
- Polanyi, M. (1966). The Tacit Dimension. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
- Nonaka, I. (1994). A dynamic theory of organizational knowledge creation. Organization Science, 5(1), 14–37.
- Nonaka, I., & Takeuchi, H. (1995). The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Nonaka, I., & Konno, N. (1998). The concept of "ba": Building a foundation for knowledge creation. California Management Review, 40(3), 40–54.