Putting knowledge creation in practice through Learning 3.0
I was present at the first Learning Camp about Learning 3.0 which was a consolidation of the last few years of various ideas and perceptions about the learning and knowledge I had. So, why was this Learning Camp so important for me? Well, here’s Nonaka and Takeuchi’s account about the development of the first automated bread-making machine for home use. It will help me to exemplify what I learned.
The Matsushita case
In the early 80´s the Osaka-based Matsushita Electric Company was thinking about how to improve Matsushita’s competitiveness in its core businesses through careful attention to cost and marketing and to assemble the resources necessary to enter new markets. Then, in 1985 product developers at the Matsushita’s Company were hard at work on a new home bread-making machine. According to the standard account, the team faced three problems in developing the machine. The first was ‘how to mechanize the dough-kneading process, which is essential knowledge possessed by master bakers’. The other two concerned temperature and ingredient variability. The ideal ambient temperature was 27 to 28 degrees centigrade, yet the variation in Japan ranged between 5 and 35 degrees centigrade. Different brands and kinds of flour and yeast further complicated the control system. They were having trouble getting the machine to knead dough correctly. Despite their efforts, the crust of the bread was overcooked while the inside was hardly done at all. Employees exhaustively analyzed the problem. They even compared X-rays of dough kneaded by the machine and dough kneaded by professional bakers. But they were unable to obtain any meaningful data.
A software developer Ikuko Tanaka from Matsushita’s company proposed a creative solution. The Osaka International Hotel had a reputation for making the best bread in Osaka. Why not use it as a model? Tanaka trained the hotel’s head baker to study his kneading technique. She observed that the baker had a distinctive way of stretching the dough. Tanaka was able to transfer her knowledge to the engineers by using the phrase “twisting stretch” to provide a rough image of kneading. The team came up with product specifications that successfully reproduced the head baker’s stretching technique. The team then materialized this concept, putting it together into a manual, and embodied it in the product. The temperature problem was solved by adding the yeast at a later stage in the process. It was the way people had made bread in the past. Finally, the solution for different brands can be identified in a “marketing-feature” of the machine: “For even further convenience, a pre-measured bread-mix package can be used to save the trouble of measuring out the required ingredients”.
The team members enrich their own tacit knowledge base. In particular, they come to understand in an extremely intuitive way that products like the home bread-making machine can provide genuine quality, as good as that of a professional. Then, team members spread their new knowledge about product development through the Matsushita’s company. They were able to help all Matsushita’s product development teams to create new products — whether kitchen appliances, audiovisual equipment, or white goods.
How have product developers at Matsushita´s Company got the knowledge to do it ?
Home bread-making machine’s innovation illustrates a movement between two very different types of knowledge. The end point of that movement is “explicit” knowledge: the product specifications for the bread-making machine. Explicit knowledge is formal and systematic. For this reason, it can be easily communicated and shared, in product specifications or a scientific formula or a computer program. But the starting point of home bread-making machine’s innovation is another kind of knowledge that is not so easily expressible: “tacit” knowledge, like that possessed by the chief baker at the Osaka International Hotel. Tacit knowledge consists partly of technical skills — the kind of informal, hard-to-pin-down skills captured in the term “know-how.” At the same time, tacit knowledge has an important cognitive dimension. It consists of mental models, beliefs, and perspectives so ingrained that we take them for granted and therefore cannot easily articulate them. Tacit knowledge is highly personal. It is hard to formalize and, therefore, difficult to communicate to others. Tacit knowledge is also deeply rooted in action and in an individual’s commitment to a specific context — a craft or profession, a particular technology or product market, or the activities of a work group or team. The result of interaction between explicit and tacit knowledge is new knowledge. More specifically, it happens when human beings exchange creative activities among them.
The result of interaction between explicit and tacit knowledge is new knowledge. More specifically, it happens when human beings exchange creative activities among them.
It could be discerned as four conversion processes which are shown in the steps of Nonaka and Takeuchi’s account about Matsushita’s home bread-making machine.
Putting tacit and explicit knowledge together
If we look at Nonaka and Takeuchi’s account under the aspects of interaction between tacit and explicit knowledge, we will realise the following:
1. When Ikuko Tanaka apprentices herself to the head baker at the Osaka International Hotel, she learns his tacit skills through observation, imitation, and practice. The head baker somehow stimulated started to share his knowledge, then they exchanged abilities, experiences, ideas and perceptions around the subject. They become part of her own tacit knowledge base. Put another way, she is “socialized” into the craft. It describes a process called socialisation.
2. When Ikuko Tanaka is able to articulate the foundations of her tacit knowledge of bread making, she converts it into explicit knowledge, thus allowing it to be shared with her project-development team.The team changed the tacit knowledge into articulated and transferable knowledge. The knowledge was materialized, putting it together into specifications, aiming to organise externally (outside mind) and send this knowledge to receivers. This process is called externalisation.
3. When the developers team combined the first machine’s specifications with the new ones and, after some trial and error, the team came up with a new product specifications, putting it together in a manual, that reproduced the head baker’s stretching technique. This process is called combination.
4. The new tacit insight about genuine quality developed in designing the home bread-making machine was informally conveyed to other Matsushita employees. They used it to formulate equivalent quality standards for other new Matsushita products. In this way, the organization’s knowledge base grew ever broader. Then, people could improve or make new tacit knowledge, in a process called internalisation.
Learning through Nonaka and Takeuchi’s account
What did the developers team learn from all this?
The answer to their question started at the moment that they made up their mind to learn about how to bake a bread, not just how to mechanize the bread making process. They got involved in a learning process where required knowledge emerged to the company in a new way.
What could you learn from Nonaka and Takeuchi’s account ?
Those processes of knowledge creation (socialisation, externalisation, combination and internalisation) from Nonaka and Takeuchi’s account have improved developers team´s knowledge of the subject and it grew through a spiral. After a sequence of processes, a new sequence has started, helping more people to learn about the subject and making the knowledge to take effect in something useful. So, learning and knowledge are interconnected through an iterative process of mutual reinforcement. The learning — the process — creates new knowledge — the content — that affects future learning and so on.
What have I learned?
I have already learned those processes from Nonaka and Takeuchi’s account, but it was never clear for me how to put it into practice in a simple way. In the Learning Camp I learned about the learning flow proposed by Learning 3.0, then I realized the relationship between these concepts. In that flow, those processes from Nonaka and Takeuchi’s account were inserted into a pragmatic structure that started with a real world problem to be solved. This flowed forward through people trying to give meaning to experiences, researching for knowledge (how to solve the problems in developing the machine) with the help of connections (chief baker, engineers, software developer Ikuko Tanaka, others) and trying to get meaningful outcomes from their activities (a functional home bread-making machine). This ended by sharing what was learned among all the stakeholders in order to consolidate learning and turn it into something useful for people and an organisation. It was clear to me where Learning 3.0 meets those processes of knowledge creation. The learning flow — problem to be solved, researching, connecting, practicing and sharing — is about learning by transforming tacit and explicit knowledge within those processes of knowledge generation.
Therefore, learning flow have helped me to understand how put those processes in action to create something helpful. Furthermore, I have learned from Learning 3.0 principles and ideas how to help people enter this flow of learning and to provide what they need to do to find new insights toward useful outcomes.
