Friedman's Triple Convergence, Dixon's Eras of Knowledge Management, and Leadership

The purpose of this blog post is to discuss the relation between Friedman’s Triple Convergence and Dixon’s Knowledge Management Evolution, followed by my reflection on the role leadership plays with respect to knowledge management.

Tom Friedman’s Triple Convergence is the coming together of three transformations at the same time, from the 1990’s through the mid 2000’s.  One sphere of influence were the ten “flatteners” he described as enabling the world community to come together, including flatteners such as uploading, outsourcing, offshoring, insourcing, in-forming, etc.  The second sphere of influence was a sea change in the way people interacted and did business.  A good example is Friedman’s discussion of Southwest Airlines’ availing of the check-in process online.  The third sphere of influence in the Triple Convergence are the addition of billions of people in China, India, Russia and elsewhere filling the vacuum created by the flatteners and new processes.

 

 

Nancy Dixon introduced the evolution of Knowledge Management (KM) that occurred during the same general period described in Friedman’s Triple Convergence.  She described knowledge as “what it is” and “how we know it”.  She says that the first era of KM was the leveraging of explicit knowledge such as documents and stable specific/analytical data.  The second era was the leveraging of experiential knowledge.  This knowledge concerned content specific, dynamic data that was produced real-time as a result of understanding, i.e. know how.  An important point about this era is that front-line workers now had the capability to understand and reflect on their own processes and the tools to make real-time adjustments to enhance their productivity.  The third era in the KM evolution is the leveraging of collective knowledge, whereby “meaning is created, not discovered”.  Whereas subject matter experts and frontline workers, respectively, were predominant in the prior eras, in this era a diverse cross-section of people, organizations, customers and suppliers are involved.  And, for the first time, data is transparent and not controllable.

Friedman’s Triple Convergence and Dixon’s KM Evolution are related in two predominant ways, in my opinion.  First, Friedman’s baseline product was knowledge, the access to, manipulation of and utilization of knowledge.  Each KM era availed data in lockstep with the advancements made during the Triple Conversion time period.  Second, the by-product of the use and production of knowledge within the Triple Convergence was creativity, which created an infinite do-loop of knowledge availing creativity availing knowledge availing creativity, and so on.  The social learning created by the Triple Convergence in turn availed sharing of data not so well during the explicit KM era, better during the experiential era, and best now during the collective era.

So, what is incumbent upon leaders with respect to the sharing of knowledge?  Dixon offers that leaders must build “knowledge repositories”, support “communities of practice”, and design “meetings, retreats, or conferences, based on principles of collective knowledge.”  Customers, suppliers, partners and others outside if your organization should be brought into the conversation.  Leaders should embrace the new technologies and foster an environment of support for social collaboration.  Leaders should build their organization to expect and embrace change, for it is coming quickly and will be unstoppable.

I also believe that leaders have a moral obligation to consider the social good in the sharing of data, where matters such as privacy and sensitivity are protected – it only makes for good business.  Leaders should use knowledge to create meaning, and the meaning should be grounded in Charisms that produce not only societal benefits but also profits.  For one without the other is not sustaining in the long run, or at the least, not a worthwhile endeavor.

References

Friedman, T. L. (2005). The world is flat: A brief history of the twenty-first century. New York: Picador.

http://www.nancydixonblog.com/2009/05/where-knowledge-management-has-been-and-where-it-is-going-part-one.html

http://www.nancydixonblog.com/2009/05/knowledge-management-where-weve-been-and-where-were-going---part-two.html

http://www.nancydixonblog.com/2009/07/where-knowledge-management-has-been-and-where-it-is-going-part-three.html