Book Summary:
Title: Enabling Knowledge Creation – How to unlock the mystery of tacit knowledge and release the
power of innovation
Authors: Georg von Grogh, Kazuno Ichijo and Ikujiro Nonaka
After my presentation about knowledge management, you sensitize me not only to focus on the
technical and informational side of knowledge management but also on the human and organizational
culture side.
In this book the authors explain how to establish a corporation structure and culture in which the
employees share and especially create new knowledge voluntarily. In their opinion the key to innovative
and seminal idea is tacit knowledge. The authors think that knowledge is not manageable. Thus they talk
not from knowledge management but rather from knowledge enabling.
In this book are new concepts explained with additional examples about how knowledge in
organizations can be created and used.
I decided to make not a summary in the traditional way because I think this book gives us so many good
insights in a knowledge management approach which is focused on tacit knowledge. I created an extend
version of a table of content. So you can have in a short time a good insight in the book.
Chapter 1: From Managing to enabling knowledge
1. Not knowledge management but rather knowledge enabling. This interpretation includes facilitating
relationships and conversion as well as sharing knowledge across an organization or beyond geographic
and cultural borders. 4
2. Five knowledge enablers:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Instill a knowledge vision
Manage conversations
Mobilize knowledge activists
Create the right context , and
Globalize local knowledge
3. Five organizational knowledge creation steps:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Sharing tacit knowledge
Creating concepts
Justifying concepts
Building a prototype
Cross leveling knowledge
4. Knowledge enabling emphasizes human relationships and good communication; it can have a positive
impact on:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Quality of knowledge
The speed with which that new knowledge is created
Employee satisfaction
Corporate Image
Relation with suppliers and
Other strategic partners
Intangible improvements
4. Microcommunities of Knowledge
 Especially small communities can encourage the knowledge creating process
 Characterized:
o Face to face interaction
o Common fields of interest
o Corresponding forms of behavior
 Formed Top down or Bottom up
 Focus is on creating knowledge
Chapter 2: The limits of knowledge management: Why so many barriers exist.
1. Individual Barriers to knowledge creation
 Limited accommodation
 Threat to self-image
2. Organizational barriers
 Need for a legitimate language
 Organizational stories
 Organizational procedures
 Company paradigms
3. Pitfall of knowledge management
1. Knowledge relies on easily detectable, quantifying able information
2. Knowledge management is devoted to the manufacturer of tools
 Some measure the quality of knowledge
 Others prepare the organization to retain the knowledge of the leaving employees
 Tools often constrains the employees to much
 Most important is a climate which fosters: trust, care and personal networks
 Tools should not be imposed
3. Knowledge management depends on a knowledge officer


Better: Resource allocation for knowledge creation is the responsibility of line managers
Knowledge creation should be without boundaries, involving multiple disciplines,
multiple functions and organization members with different experience.
4. How knowledge Enabling avoids the pitfalls: Three premises
1. Knowledge is justified true belief, individual and social, tacit and explicit.
2. Knowledge depends on your perspective
 Upward and downward scaling are both important ways of knowing a phenomenon
better
3. Knowledge creation is a craft, not a science
Chapter 3: Care in the organization – Why enabling context matters
1. Two contexts:
 Hypercompetitive
 Enabling
2. Four different actions:
 Seizing
 Transacting
 Bestowing
 Indwelling : Can affect social knowledge creation (47)
3. The need for care: From western philosophers to Ba
 To care for other is to help them learn
 Dimensions of care:
o Mutual trust
o Active Empathy
o Lenience in judgment
o Access to help
o Courage
 Indwelling in the workplace a practical guide:
o Review the knowledge
o Identify sources of tacit knowledge
 Customer
 Supplier
 Strategic partners
 Organizational units
 Others
o Establish caring relationships with each source of tacit knowledge
o Build up a common experience base with each source of tacit knowledge
 Allow for numerous reiterations of steps 4 and 5
 Evaluate the results of indwelling
4. Care and knowledge enabling: How to build a good foundation
 Creating trust



o Create a sense of mutual dependence
o Make trustworthy behavior a part of performance reviews
o Increase individual reliability by formulating a map of expectations
Increasing active empathy
o Invest in training in listening behavior
o Might emphasize
Fostering helping behavior
o Training in pedagogical skills
o Training in intervention techniques
o Making accessible help an element of performance appraisal
o Sharing stories of helping behavior
Lenience, Courage and mentorship
o Top Management must communicate this values
Chapter 4: Strategy and knowledge Creation (Ensuring Survival in the present
and advancement in the future)
1. The responsibility of management is twofold:
 Managers have to unleash the potential represented by an organization’s knowledge into valuecreating actions. They need to identify what the organization know
 Managers have to ensure the creation of unique knowledge, which provides a competitive
advantage.
2. New strategic framework:
 Survival strategies
o Maintain the current level of success
 Predominantly knowledge transforming
 Advancement strategies
o Emphasize future success
o Necessary for knowledge creating companies
 Predominantly knowledge creating
3. Advancement and knowledge creation
 Knowledge creation process comprises 5 steps (see above)
o Manager can’t embark on a strategy unless they don’t know how these steps are linked
Chapter 5: Enabler 1: Instill a knowledge vision
1. Vision
 Foresight about a future
Balance
 Present situation
 Knowledge vision gives corporate planners a mental map of three related domains:
o The world they live in
o The world they ought to live in, and
o The knowledge they should seek and create
2. Criteria for a good knowledge vision
 Commitment to a direction
 Generativity
 Specific Style
 Focus on restructuring the current knowledge system
 Focus on restructuring the current task system
 External communication of values
 Commitment to Shaping Competitiveness
3. Management approaches
 Top down visionaries
 Expert visionaries
 Distributed visionaries
 360 Degree visionaries
o Knowledge Creation as an overall organizational activity
o 5 useful management action
 Identify and gather participants and organize the process
 Build a common understanding among participants of what a knowledge vision
is and the seven criteria for a good one (narratives)
 Write up and use narratives of the future as platforms for the vision process
 Allow ample time for instilling a vision
 Consider the knowledge-vision process as a learning process
Chapter 6: Enabler 2: Manage conversations
1. Conversations that inspire knowledge creation require a number of Socratic ingredients:
 Openness
 Patience
 The ability to listen
 Experimentation with new words and concepts
 Politeness
 The formation of persuasive argument
 Courage
2. Two distinct conversational purposes:
 Knowledge confirmation
 Knowledge creation
o In the different stages of the knowledge creation process are different purposes needed
3. Four guiding principles for conversations that enable knowledge creation
 Actively encouraging participation
 Establishing conversational etiquette
 Editing conversations appropriately
 Fostering innovative language
o A new metaphor or analogy leads to a new concept
o
o
o
The new concept sparks a conversation about what this might mean in practice,
generating many interpretations
The circle of meaning gradually tightens and its boundary becomes increasingly visible
The circle narrows even more, representing the groups shared understanding of and
agreement about new concepts
Chapter 7: Enabler 3: Mobilize Knowledge Activists
1. What a knowledge activist does three roles:
 Catalyst of knowledge creation
 Coordinators of knowledge-creation initiatives: (Three conceptual issues)
o The Microcommunity perspective
o Imagined communities
o Shared maps of cooperation
o Merchants of foresight
 Purpose of knowledge activism
o Initiating and focusing knowledge creation
o Reducing the time and cost necessary for knowledge creation
o Leveraging knowledge-creation initiatives throughout the corporation
o Improving the conditions of those engaged in knowledge creation by relating their
activities to the companies bigger picture
o Preparing participants in knowledge creation for new tasks in which their knowledge is
needed
o Including the perspective of microcommunities in the larger debate on organizational
transformation
Chapter 8: Enabler 4: Create the right context
1. Creating a shared knowledge space: Four kinds of interaction – The knowledge spiral
 Originating
 Conversing
 Documenting
 Internalizing
2. How to create a coherent enabling context, one that fits both their knowledge vision and business
Strategy.
 The right context must be accompanied by the right organizational structure
o Examples:
 Toshiba ( Cross-divisional unit)
 Maekawa (Task force)
 Sony ( Platform/ virtual network, Empowered division)
Chapter 9: Enabler 5: Globalize local knowledge
1. Knowledge should not longer be considered as an abstract commodity, than can be sent from one
part of the organization to another
 Knowledge globalization should be should be carried out like this:
o Triggering knowledge exchange
 Cost effective mechanisms
 Bulletin boards
 Regular knowledge conferencing
 Use of knowledge activists
o Packaging & Dispatching
o Re-creating
 Own version of microcommunity
 Selected group of participants
 Unpack the explicit knowledge
 Interpret what they see
 Share tacit knowledge about their observations including their aspirations and
hopes