Abstract
Carsten Lund Pedersen on knowing what we don’t know.
One thing I know is that large organizations rarely know what they actually know. A disturbing amount of knowledge is hidden in plain sight in many organizations. This results in potentially valuable knowledge remaining a secret to both employees and managers. For instance, in some of my own work I’ve uncovered the so-called frontline paradox, a phenomenon in which frontline employees are the first to sense impending change, but also the last to be heard within their organizations. When suffering from this paradox, organizations lose out on valuable information that could give them a timely heads-up to emerging change; employees, in turn, feel frustrated that their voices aren’t heard and that their insights are ignored.
There’s also substantial evidence on stealth-mode, shadow activities in many large organizations. Several studies suggest that when employees sense an environmental pressure requiring their response, but their organizations aren’t listening to them, they may turn into mavericks who take matters into their own hands. The end result of this rule-breaking tends to be the emergence of shadow or stealth projects, often with a positive outcome for the organization. For example, in my own empirical research on the phenomenon, I encountered a group of employees who broke organizational rules and formal procedures to launch a new product to market without official approval. Despite this potentially constructive deviance, shadow activities are a symptom of the organizational illness of being ignorantly knowledgeable.
Why does this organizational illness occur? According to some studies, the answer lies in both cognitive and motivational factors. In relation to the cognitive factors, the more expert you become, the more difficult it is for you to share your expertise with others—it’s been called the “curse of knowledge.” Just consider how difficult it can be for a professor to teach first-year students or to discuss their research with laypeople; it’s difficult for them to realize how much more they know about their subject, and they tend to incorrectly presume that people are familiar with the terminology of their discipline. In addition, if the expertise is built upon tacit knowledge, it’s very difficult to transfer and articulate it explicitly. It’s no wonder so many crafts are taught through hands-on master-apprentice relationships, as seen in the world of haute cuisine. We also know that decision makers are boundedly rational, meaning that they have constraints that impede them from taking in all of the relevant information. Here we can think of how difficult it was for governments to initially respond to the emergence of COVID-19. They didn’t have access to all the needed information regarding the nature and scope of the epidemic, and they couldn’t process all the information at their disposal in the short timespan they had available.
In relation to motivational factors, organizational life is rarely structured to incentivize knowledge sharing. Here, individuals and teams are often organized to compete not collaborate. For instance, if a salesperson competes against her colleagues for a bonus or a promotion—a winner-takes-all game—it would arguably be irrational to collaborate or share information given the organizational circumstances. Yet, forcing employees to share knowledge may lead to the opposite result, as reflected in reactance theory (people can balk when they’re told what to do). Moreover, philosopher Slavoj Zizek has suggested the existence of so-called “unknown knowns”—things we won’t even admit we know, as they represent “uncomfortable knowledge” (think taboos or self-deception). Yet, the simplest explanation for a reticence to share may be that if the receivers of the information are not willing to listen, the senders are proactively discouraged from speaking up.
Given all this, we arguably need to speak up about organizational silence and become knowledgeable about our ignorance. For instance, we can speak up about organizational silence by tracking and demonstrating how much we, ourselves, know about our organizations and, for some reason, don’t share with relevant colleagues; assessing the underlying reasons for this silence; and committing ourselves to sharing certain “nuggets of knowledge” we might otherwise keep to ourselves. We can also become knowledgeable about our own ignorance by routinely keeping a list of things we realize we don’t know about our organizations, then seeking out relevant coworkers for help in obtaining the knowledge.
Most organizations know more than they know. If only organizations knew what they knew, they might know how to get ahead. Unlike ignorantly knowledgeable organizations, this is one thing I know that I know.