Managing Knowledge, Innovation and Change PDF

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Managing Knowledge, Innovation and Change Discuss how managing organisational practices, structures and processes has changed with the advance of post-bureaucratic management approaches Managing People and Organisations | 14 October

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Learning and knowledge can take many forms and derive from many different sources, it is also a combination of individual autonomous efforts as well as organisational level activities, because of this it creates an underlying mechanism for change and innovation. Fulop and Rifkin (1999) argue that there are four fundamentally influential sources of knowledge, these can be listed as; 

Learning by doing

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Hearing stories

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Being exposed to popular accounts

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Being curious and doing research

However, innovation and knowledge require a balance between structure and improvisation as it is a constantly ongoing process of change. The common definition of innovation is often described as something new or novel (Read, 2000), however as defined by Padmore, Schuetze & Gibson (1998), and Cooper (1998) innovation can also be have an implied feature of an innovation, making it practical and useful, with contribution to the firm’s practice, differentiating it from invention. Therefore, we can depict bureaucracy as a rigid structure that assumes the rationality and stability of an organisation will eventually be forced into the more radical and self-directed form of management. The process of change isn’t entirely rational but can be led with some rationality as innovators will not directly influence change but study the current flow of the organisation and current events of the world. In this paper we show how innovation and changes are constants within organisations due to several factors such as, individuals and leaders, where organisations can attempt to lead change but will eventually be forced to change as society evolves.

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To reiterate, bureaucracy assumes that an organisation is stable and rational, Taylor (2014) the founder of scientific management, states that the “initiative” of workmen is obtained through absolute uniformity, to further explain has produced an explicit set of knowledge through observation and experimentation and as a result created a rigid set of procedures. Hence initiatives to change and innovation are undesirable disruptions, as post-bureaucracy accepts the knowledge that change is the leadup and necessary to innovation. As technology develops and innovation and knowledge increase change, is forced therefore constant learning happens throughout a network organisation. However, it is important to note that the key driver in change as a result of organisational learning and innovation are the individuals within it, hence as Argyris and Schon (1978) states; “Organisational learning occurs when individuals within an organisation experience a problematic situation and inquire into it on the organisational behalf. They experience a surprising mismatch between expected and actual results of action and respond to that mismatch through a process of thought and further action that leads them to modify their images of organisation or their understandings of organisational phenomena and to restructure their activities so as to bring outcomes and expectations into line, thereby changing organisational theory ‐in ‐use.” Organisation that gain a competitive advantage over others, is due to the ability of its workforce to learn and gain knowledge faster than their competitors, establishing one of the only sustainable way to gain that advantage (De Geus, 1998). Consequently, from the learning and behaviour of the people within it can an organisation evolve (Burgoyne and Pedler, 1994). In

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addition to this, organisational learning can only exist if the individuals interact with others, resulting in the gain of experience (Kolb, 1984). However, the perspective of the individual is not the only one that exists within learning and innovation process (Pooper and Lipshitz, 2000). The transformational leader also interact with these individuals and like all others, learn and gain experience. Leadership to say has five disciplines according to Senge (1990). These five disciplines are; 

Personal Mastery

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Mental models

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Shared vision,

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Team learning

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Systems thinking

Nevertheless, it can also be argued that strategic management has come from the increasing recognition of the central role played by (Grant, 1991; Hamel and Prahalad, 1994); 

The internal resources of the firm

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Strategic skill pools and core competencies in search for competitive advantage

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Highlighting the role of organisational learning in corporate strategy

But why leadership? And in conjunction with this, why teams? Including the roles above, leadership is the necessary mediator between the organisation and its people (Smith and Peterson, 1988), in addition, Senge (1990) explains that teams are born out of experience, hence providing us with insight into the limitations of leadership. However, an approach to linking individual and organisational learning through leadership as the roles of directors are the focus and the “business brain”, as they coordinate between strategy and operations (Garret, 1987). As a 3| PAG E

result, teams are a powerful key for reflection, dialogue and the sharing of learning, whereas leadership plays an important role in reshaping the transforming the roles depicted by Senge (1990) above. In addition, values such as communication, openness, the willingness to learn and a shared vision, along with rewarding initiatives and recognising teamwork are all aspects of an organisation’s learning (Argyrus, 1987; Senge, 1990). One such company thrives on innovation and learning within the organisation, and that is Google. As a company, it relies heavily on and has built an entire culture on innovation, as they continuously build and innovate several “Google” products and services. Their engineers are encouraged to look into other engineer’s products to find a bug and suggest a fix, proving our argument in the changes to learning and innovation within an organisation, because of this Google has proved to be quite enduring within the new era of post-bureaucracy as the company builds upon itself with their own internal HR and talent management systems (Bersin, 2018). In spite of this, there are fallacies with the management of knowledge and innovation, where innovator’s dilemma occurs, which is defined by tendency to favour more sustaining technologies are made as opposed to disruptive technologies to generate more profit. In addition to this, knowledge acts as a barrier to learning (Starbuck, 1983), as organisations assume once they obtain the knowledge it is all they need to know and becomes so proficient in their field that they no longer see the scope of their achievements, therefore can no longer adapt and change to their environment. Furthermore, when an organisation falls into post-bureaucracy they can most often than not be lulled into a sense of security and proficiency in their field, this often results into the competency 4| PAGE

trap as a result of knowledge exploitation. As organisations divide their attention into two broad activities; knowledge exploration and knowledge exploitation (March, 1991), where knowledge exploitation is defined by the use of existing competencies as well as further exploration. Knowledge exploitation is essentially the gaining of competence by adopting, synthesising, and applying current or existing knowledge. Through the curation of existing knowledge, it generates moderate but certain and immediate returns, in contrast, knowledge exploration is unpredictable and highly uncertain and often reflects the organisation’s ability to obtain new knowledge and creates variety in experience through ‘search, variation, risking and experimentation as well as the flexibility, discovery and the innovation of new knowledge’ (Liu, 2006). Thus, there is no simple universal formula for successful innovation; it is nonlinear, work at many levels and is far too complex to be pinned down it is a result of something uniquely human and cannot be replicated or done by humans. However, they do not occur at random, this happens as a result of the environment around them, the factors and the conditions of the organisation. The characteristics of innovation systems are that they recruit and retain highly skilled and trained personnel, give them access to knowledge, and then encourage and enable them to think and act innovatively (Serrat, 2017). Managing change, knowledge and innovation, has changed from the rigid bureaucratic structure where once knowledge is obtain that is all that is needed, not allowing for innovation or change within the organisation, to the flexible post-bureaucratic method of management, where it is accepted that change allows us to pave way for innovation along with knowledge, that adapting to the social and economic climate allows an organisation to endure and succeed. References:

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1. Argyris, C., 1987. The leadership dilemma: skilled incompetence'. Business and Economic Review, 1(1), pp.4-11. 2. Argyris, C. and Schön, D., 1978. Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective Massachusetts. Reading, Addison-Wesley. 3. Barney, J., 1991. Firm resources and sustained competitive advantage. Journal of management, 17(1), pp.99-120. 4. Bersin, J. (2018). Managing Innovation: Google and a Learning Culture - Bersin by Deloitte. [online] Bersin by Deloitte. Available at: https://blog.bersin.com/managing-innovationgoogle-and-a-learning-culture/ [Accessed 5 Oct. 2018]. 5. Burgoyne, J. and Pedler, M., 1994. Learning companies; their significance and characteristics. In readings from the Learning Company Conference. 6. Cooper, J. (1998). A multidimensional approach to the adoption of innovation. Management Decision, 36(8), pp.493-502. 7. De Geus, A.P., 1988. Planning as learning (pp. 70-74). March/April: Harvard Business Review. 8. Fulop, L. and Rifkin, W.D., 1999. Management knowledge and learning. In Management (pp. 14-47). Palgrave, London. 9. Grant, R.M., 1999. The resource-based theory of competitive advantage: implications for strategy formulation. In Knowledge and strategy (pp. 3-23). 10. Grønhaug, K. and Kaufmann, G. eds., 1988. Innovation: A cross-disciplinary perspective. Oxford University Press, USA. 11. Hamel, G. and Prahalad, C.K., 1994. Competing for the future Harvard business school press. Boston, MA.

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12. Kolb, D.A., 1984. Experiential Learning: Experience as The Source of Learning and Development. Englewood Cliffs: PrenticeHall. 13. Liu, W. (2006). Knowledge exploitation, knowledge exploration, and competency trap. Knowledge and Process Management, 13(3), pp.144-161. 14. March, J. (1991). Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning. Organization Science, 2(1), pp.71-87. 15. Padmore, T., Schuetze, H. and Gibson, H. (1998). Modeling systems of innovation: An enterprise-centered view. Research Policy, 26(6), pp.605-624. 16. Popper, M. and Lipshitz, R., 2000. Installing mechanisms and instilling values: the role of leaders in organizational learning. The Learning Organization, 7(3), pp.135-145. 17. Read, A., 2000. Determinants of successful organisational innovation: a review of current research. Journal of management practice, 3(1), pp.95-119. 18. Senge, P.M., 1990. The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practise of The Learning Organisation, Century Business. ISBN 0-7126-56871. 19. Serrat, O., 2017. Harnessing creativity and innovation in the workplace. In Knowledge Solutions (pp. 903-910). Springer, Singapore. 20. Smith, P.B. and Peterson, M.F., 1988. Leadership, organizations and culture: An event management model. Sage Publications, Inc. 21. Taylor, F. (2014). The principles of scientific management. Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino Fine Books.

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Reflection Having examined the feedback given from the first assignment and the analytics tool provide by UTS and Grammerly, I have noticed that I have the tendency to not summarise or states my goals within a paper. I generally have a good grasp on structure and formatting of an essay. As a person with a position as a student I realise I have many tools at my disposal to use, using grammerly (figure 1a, 1b, 1c) it is has shown me that my grammar and vocabulary is often misused, and had indicated that perhaps that I should place a reference in places where it might be needed, therefore I have changed as needed, using this tool I’ve realised that while my spelling and grammar is generally strong, there are times when an outside source or several readings well help me remedy and move past this general problem. As with the UTS analytics tools (figure 2), as said before I have a tendency to not state what position I have taken in the argument or state my intentions, because of this I’ve sought to place intentions in the essay and as a result has greatly to me improved my writing skills. Another skill I was to improve was to provide more concise and logical arguments as I noticed I also have a tendency to “fluff” the essay. However, I do believe I have a good grasp in using peer reviewed articles. This reflection though has provided me with gaps in my knowledge and I have learnt so much in what I thought was the write way to write an essay. It certainly expanded in what I believe the gaps in my knowledge or limitations in my writing style.

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Figure 1c Figure 1a

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