Knowledge sharing, complex environments and small-worlds

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Metcalfe, Mike

Affiliations: University of South Australia, Australia. E-mail: mike.metcalfe@unisa.edu.au

Abstract: This paper is about knowledge sharing vision appropriate for a complex environment. In these environments, traditional views of knowledge sharing as informing a hierarchical, centralised leadership may be misleading. A complex environment is defined as one that emerges unpredictable changes that require organisations to reconnect, to reorganise. Organisations need to be able to rapidly reconnect relationships so as to reflect new priorities, and to do so without causing change “bottlenecks”. The empirical biologists have observed that some social species have evolved structures that enable them to do this automatically what ever the environmental change. These organisational forms have survived for millions of years without central planning; rather they use local knowledge is reconnect as required overall providing an appropriate strategic response. These organisational forms seem to result from the small-worlds phenomenon and it is self organising. Specifically, this paper will argue that this small-worlds, self organisation, phenomena is a useful vision for designing a knowledge sharing vision appropriate for a complex environment. The supportive evidence is provided in the form of identifying the empirical attributes of self organisation and small worlds to provide an explanation of how and why it works. The system thinking, biology (insect) and the social-network literature are used.

Keywords: Small-worlds, self organisation, knowledge sharing vision

DOI: 10.3233/HSM-2005-24301

Journal: Human Systems Management, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 185-195, 2005