Just came across this story of Jim McGee: Knowledge work as craft work
Highlights from the text (bold is mine):
…The “symbolic analysis” that Robert Reich identifies as the essence of knowledge work is designed to create the one-of-a-kind results that characterize craft products…
…There is a dangerous tension between industrial frameworks and knowledge work as craft work that needs to be managed. Forcing industrial models onto the management of knowledge and knowledge work accounts for much of the disappointing results of knowledge management efforts to date…
…One thing that differentiates knowledge work today from other craft work is that, except for final product, knowledge work is essentially invisible…
…While today’s tools have made the journey from germ of an idea to finished product so much easier, they have also made it harder by making it less visible…
Direct value of visibility
…One value is in the ability to backtrack to a previous version when a line of analysis fails to pan out. Moreover, that ability to backtrack can make it more likely that alternatives will be explored because the effort and risk of doing so is reduced…
Indirect value of visibility
…The first will be increasing the value of knowledge work as a learning environment for other knowledge workers. As craft work, knowledge work fits more into apprenticeship learning models than in conventional training approaches. Making the work process and its intermediate products more visible will make the apprenticeship process more effective
The second aspect of visibility is better leverage of communities of expertise and practice. More and more of the difficult problems organizations face require groups of experts to coordinate their expertise and invent multi-disiciplinary solutions. These problems don’t identify themselves in advance. They show up. They generally get addressed by whatever team can be identified and assembled quickly. The more visible you can make those experts and their expertise by making their thinking visible, the more likely you will be able to field a team that will work…
He logically finishes with linking these to blogs development :)
Tags: e-learningArchived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2002/10/18.html#a285; comments are here.
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