A Folklorist Meets Hollywood: Knowledge Management
and the Creation of Affecting Works

Karen Dietz

Introduction

Folklorists have been working within and around organizations for years now but are not generally well known in the business community. This article and its accompanying client Report, which stems from my work as a Folklorist within a large entertainment company, is an examination of the necessary elements and ability of an organization to create memorable products that become cultural icons. I was hired by Conglomerated Entertainment Industries (CEI) [the name has been changed to protect the company's confidentiality] to offer opinions about the Company's products from a Folklore perspective.

The purpose of this article and the accompanying Report is several-fold:

1. To discuss some of the ins and outs of consulting as it pertains to the formation of this project, its delivery and result.
2. To illustrate how Folklore as a discipline is becoming relevant to consulting in organizations today, particularly as it relates to the young field of Knowledge Management (KM).
3. To provide an example of an actual deliverable (the Report) to a client

While the Report was provided to a specific client, the content is actually applicable to any business, organization, group or community evaluating the potency of its artifacts, whether it be a particular type of consumer product, or for a song, dance, piece of artwork or craft. We will use CEI as a case study to illustrate this point. The Report is not an evaluation of the organization as a business, which would have included volumes of cultural and financial data. It is instead part of a KM project and lays out criteria for any organization to be aware of in producing particular types of consumer products. As a result, the article will be part biographical as I talk about consulting and applying Folklore in an organization, and part theoretical when Knowledge Management and the content of the Report is discussed.

This article will frame the study, its inception, scope, context and result. The Report shared here contains non-company specific information, is material generally available to the public, and can be applied to a variety of organizations. The language reflects a Report written for a client and is not a typical academic research article. All material confidential to the Company is deleted.

The Context

The Company, like many in the entertainment industry and elsewhere, has been going through many years of cutbacks and downsizing in some areas, while expanding in others. Key people with institutional knowledge have left or passed away and some have not been replaced. As a consequence, less seasoned people in the Company's culture and product design/development criteria may populate the company. These people might not know as thoroughly as those who have departed what qualities create significant, memorable products. Institutional memory was being lost. Such a situation is quite common in many organizations today.

Several people in the creative and technology departments of CEI were working on developing a Knowledge Management system within the organization. Like anyone involved in KM, they were faced with many questions about what kind of knowledge is important to capture and transmit. Employees in this company were also struggling with how individuals and the organization can effectively link oral and informal knowledge transmissions to a Knowledge Management system based in technology.

With some consideration and discussion, an initial key question surfaced: "Beyond the design principles we've been following, what creates effective, memorable, powerful products?" This is an attempt to formulate the KM project questions of "What is it we know about how we create our products?" and "What is it we don't know about how we create our products?" In other words, what are the criteria, decisions, and artistic sensibilities that the Company must pay attention to and consciously transmit in order to create a product that is potent in the marketplace? Answering this question could further help the organization determine the key knowledge it wanted to retain as it moved forward in defining the KM content and system.

They asked me, as an outside consultant and as a Folklorist, to contribute my field of knowledge to their project. The Company felt that a Folklorist's perspective, as one who understands how knowledge is imbedded and transmitted in creative expressions and works, could lead to an even greater understanding of what qualities are important to have and maintain within their products.

Stranger in a Strange Land: A Folklorist in Business

For the past 10 years I've been working as a Folklorist and consultant in corporate America. Clients have been entrepreneurs, small companies and the Fortune 500 ranging from web design firms, new technology ventures, retail, biotech companies, other consulting firms and Information Technology departments of financial services corporations.

My consulting activities are focused on supporting or improving the health of organizational cultures. Besides delivering teamwork trainings or working with groups in developing products, most of my Folklore related activities include:

1. Understanding the types of stories told in an organization and under what circumstances.
2. Exploring how an organization's stories and other creative expressions are transmitting particular values.
3. Working with organizations to craft their identity based on their stories, rituals and creative expressions.
4. Creating cultural change via the power of storytelling, rituals, celebration, etc. from the bottom up.
5. Working with leaders to provide ennobling visions of the future via story.

As a Folklorist, I am always searching for ways that I can apply my skills in different business arenas. One new domain through which Folklorists can gain entrance into corporations is the field of Knowledge Management (KM). Folklorists, I believe, can obtain work as KM specialists and contribute a body of knowledge to the KM field. I say this because almost any research Folklorists conduct in some way deals with how an individual's, group's or community's knowledge is shared and transmitted across space or time. Likewise, businesses today are having to face how and why their organization's knowledge is or is not shared and transmitted across space and time.

What is Knowledge Management?

Yogesh Malhotra, Ph.D., the founder and chief knowledge architect of @Brint.com and author of Knowledge Management for Business Model Innovation and Knowledge Management and Virtual Organizations, plus numerous articles on KM,defines KM as follows:

"Knowledge Management caters to the critical issues of organizational adaptation, survival and competence in face of increasingly discontinuous environmental change. Essentially, it embodies organizational processes that seek synergistic combination of data and information-processing capacity of information technologies, and the creative and innovative capacity of human beings." ("Knowledge Management for the New World of Business," Asian Strategy Leadership Institute Review, vol. 6, 1998).

Businesses addressing the subjects of knowledge and Knowledge Management are focusing on age-old questions of how key elements of a culture are shared and transmitted. KM involves the basic issues of the nature of knowledge and reality along with what can be known, how it can be known, and how we can know what we know.

In his article, April 2000 "What is Knowledge Management?" Karl-Erik Sveiby points out that,

"Knowledge has been 'managed' at least since the first humans learned to transfer the skill to make a fire. Many early initiatives to transfer skills and information can be labeled 'Knowledge Management,' libraries being one, schools and apprenticeships others. Librarians, teachers and master craftsmen can be called 'knowledge managers.' Later database managers have been added to the list. Today's new professions include Chief Knowledge Officers, Knowledge Engineers, Intellectual Capital Directors, etc." (sveiby.com.au/KnowledgeManagement.html)

Many researchers and practitioners in KM also view knowledge as a social construct. Bruce Gold, working in the field of the Sociology of Knowledge puts KM in the following framework in his article "Knowledge and its Construction," (www/brint.com/papers/submit/gold.htm):

"From a collective viewpoint knowledge can be viewed as an artifact that is socially connected and socially constructed. From this viewpoint knowledge is seen as an organizational/historical structure tied to existential factors and particularized by different social/organizational groups."

Gold suggests the following tenets be kept in mind regarding KM:

1. "At the organizational level knowledge is an implicitly or explicitly created social artifact."
2. "Knowledge can be constructed or analyzed at two levels, at the level of content or at the level of structure [process]."
3. "Knowledge is a historical dimension. While only people 'think' it is also correct to say that they 'think further' from an inherited context of assumptions, viewpoints, values an methods."
4. "The existence of different views is not necessarily an indication of the existence of errors."

In addition, Gold outlines a series of implications when viewing KM as a social construct. For instance, he sees that KM must be tied to organizational purpose since the organization's viewpoint will determine what knowledge is deemed important and for whom. In addition, he advocates that KM must manage knowledge across a qualitative/quantitative continuum using both statistical analysis and an understanding of the organization's history, position, purpose and culture. As a result, Gold promotes the statement that KM is about systems of knowledge as well as information and data. In order for KM projects to be successful, he suggests that they include an understanding of the organization's intellectual history and culture since KM is a socially/organizationally located activity. Lastly, Gold says KM must deliver knowledge that is pertinent and useful to its users, including the unique requirements of specialized groups, while at the same time including information broad enough to be relevant to everyone in the organization.

Folklorists have long been wrestling with these issues when examining how people come to know, internalize, produce and transmit key pieces of cultural knowledge. Yet like the discipline of Folklore, multiple definitions, multiple approaches and multiple methods characterize KM. Ultimately, the two fields, Folklore and KM, are covering the same ground when it comes to how knowledge is transmitted.

Discussion about knowledge and its transmission is not an easy task. Practitioners in the field, whether they be Folklorists, Anthropologists, Sociologists, CIOs or software engineers are constantly facing questions such as:

1. What is knowledge?
2. How is that different from information, data and wisdom?
3. What is the knowledge that we need to keep ourselves intact as a group, community or organization?
4. What are the ways this knowledge is expressed (vehicles of transmission)?
5. How is knowledge transmitted in a particular situation?
6. How do we capture knowledge, share it and keep it current?
7. How, and in what ways, can technology (a non-oral and formalized experience), assist in transmitting knowledge that at its heart is oral and informal?
8. In what ways does technology need to change (new architectures perhaps) in order to effectively contribute to Knowledge Management systems?

These questions point to KM having to articulate the difference between distinct concrete items (a technical repair manual) and social processes (stories interpreting the repair manual in order to actually repair the equipment).

Unfortunately, many companies involved in KM projects rush to creating a database of company information, thinking the database constitutes the capturing of knowledge. Often in businesses where technology rules, solutions are technical in nature: "Knowledge is whatever information is in someone's head. Let's build a big database to warehouse all this info, and have it available to everyone." The erroneous assumption is that people will then use the database because it is available. Thousands of companies are making this mistake by putting technology systems in place before understanding people systems.

Karl Erik Sveiby, the author of The New Organizational Wealth: Managing and Measuring Knowledge-Based Assets, 1997, contends that the confusion between knowledge and information has caused managers to sink billions of dollars in information technology ventures that have yielded marginal results. Sveiby asserts that business managers need to realize that unlike information, knowledge is embedded in people, and knowledge creation occurs in the process of social interaction.

"In the end," Sveiby says, "innovation is the only competitive advantage that companies have and it is much harder to do than investing in an Information Technology (IT) application. Anyone can by a new 'KM' software, but very few have the ability to create sustainable creative organizations. Investment along the People-Track involves investing in people, recruitment, the office environment, etc. The bandwidth of the human infrastructure is the trust between people and between management and employees. The bandwidth requires investment, just as the IT infrastructure does. Human bandwidth is about people meeting each other, about dialogue, about environments without fear, etc." ("What is Knowledge Management, April 2000, sveiby.com.au/KnowledgeManagement.html).

In an interview with Tom Davenport and Larry Prusak, authors of Working Knowledge, How Organizations Manage What They Know, the authors also comment on the emphasis of technology:

"We say in the book that you shouldn't spend more than a third of your time thinking about technology for Knowledge Management. The other two-thirds includes culture, organizational roles and responsibilities, focusing on the knowledge content itself, strategy and economics, and so forth. Once network and communities are functioning well on a human level then you can start applying technology to ease the capture and sharing of knowledge across a network. But don't start with technology!" (brint.com/km/davenport/working.htm)

There are too many additional horror stories out there of massive 'knowledge databases' that were created and never used because they are contrary to how people actually transmit and work with knowledge. Once knowledge transmission among a group or groups has been well studied and articulated, however, discussions and strategies about how to sustain that knowledge follows. A technical solution (database) may be only a partial answer.

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