Piaras Kelly - a PR guy far too thoughtful for the business he’s in - weighs in on the “knowledge economy” fallacy with a great post. (Though I admit I was a bit nervous when I saw he’d kindly referenced me in the context of spreading a “fallacy”! Fortunately for me I came out OK.)

But Piaras makes a couple of points worth pushing back on.

1. Piaras leads with: “A running theme in the Irish media is the notion that we need to become a knowledge based economy”

But “Knowledge based economy” isn’t a media term. Just Google the term in quotes and restrict the term to Ireland. Here. What you get is a quick rundown of where the term is most frequently used. We get a lot of hackery in reports from Irish Government departments, CEOs of major multinationals (including Jim O’Hara of Intel speaking as head of the American Chamber of Commerce).

I hate the lingo “knowledge based economy”. I hate it so much I spent a whole column dissing it in August. A lot of other meeja types hate it even more than I do.

Like “paradigm shift”, “knowledge economy” is a term so overused that it’s become verbal shorthand, shorn of context, often misused. Like “paradigm shift” it’s a turn of phrase coming out of a decent book worth revisiting from a few decades ago. “Paradigm shift” from Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. “Knowledge economy” or “knowledge-based economy” from Peter Drucker’s 1969 book, The Age of Discontinuity; Guidelines to Our changing Society. Or you could just read the Wikipedia entry.

So don’t blame us for that one.

2. We can agree that workplaces as currently constructed are probably ill-suited for the “knoweldge economy” - if we’re stuck with that term. But what to replace them with? It’s not an easy nut to crack.

The 1991 HBR article Piaras cites on innovation in Japanese companies actually points up the problem reasonably well - even if leavened with now-quaint notions of Japanese corporate superiority.

It’s interesting to remember the 90s buzzterm ‘tacit knowledge’ - the opposite of the “explicit knowledge” it’s hard to write down. It seems to me that it does get to the heart of the “knowledge economy”. How do you structure work and organisations to capture the best ideas and innovations? My “digital natives” spiel at the IIA event notwithstanding, it all sounds nice, but the problem with imagining that good ideas can come from anywhere in an organisation is that, while true, it isn’t useful in organisations that are highly specialised.

Generally people tend to describe the problem as one of hierarchy and authority. Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger gave an absolutely brilliant presentation at the Institute of European Affairs in September about what he calls “the politics of knowledge”. Listen here. Coincidentally someone put the link my way today, and I want to give it some thought before getting more into it. But here’s a highlight, wherein Sanger describes online social networks as polities requiring good governance:

The idea that online communities are a kind of polity is, I think, very suggestive and fruitful. I want to talk in particular about how online communities, considered as polities, are engaged in a certain new kind of politics—a politics of knowledge. Let me explain what I mean by this.

Speaking of a “politics of knowledge,” I assume that what passes for knowledge, or what we in some sense take ourselves to know as a society, is determined by those who have authority or power of a sort. You don’t of course have to like this situation, and you might disagree with the authorities, or scoff at their authority in some cases. Nevertheless, when for example professors at Trinity College say that something is well known and not seriously doubted by anyone who knows about the subject, those professors are in effect establishing what “we all know,” or what we as a society take ourselves to know. Since those professors, and many others, speak from a position of authority about knowledge—a powerful force in society—surely it makes some sense to speak of a politics of knowledge. I just hope you won’t understand me to be saying that what really is known, in fact, is determined by whoever happens to be in authority. I’m no relativist, and I think the authorities can be, and frequently are, wrong.

If we talk about a politics of knowledge, and we take the analogy with politics seriously, then we assume that there is a sort of hierarchy of authority, with authority in matters of knowledge emanating from some agency that is “sovereign.” In short, if we put stock in the notion of the politics of knowledge, then we’re saying that, when it comes to knowing stuff, some people are at the top of the heap.

Our new online communities—our cyber-polities—are increasingly influential forces, when it comes to the politics of knowledge. When Wikipedia speaks, like it or not, people listen. So in this talk I want to discuss in particular something I call the new politics of knowledge. Any talk of a new politics of knowledge raises questions about what agency is sovereign. Well, it is often said that in the brave new world of online communities, everyone is in charge. Time Magazine’s “Man of the Year” is, by practice, usually some influential political figure. When its “Person of the Year” last year was “You,” Time didn’t break its practice. Time was rightly claiming that, through Internet communities we are all newly empowered. In the new politics of knowledge, we can all, through blogs, wikis, and many other venues, compete with real experts for epistemic authority—for power over what is considered to be known.

If this sounds like a political revolution, that’s because it is. It is frequently described as a democratic revolution. So what I’m going to do in the rest of this talk is examine exactly what sense in which the new cyber-polities, like Wikipedia, do indeed represent a sort of democratic revolution…

But what if the nub of the problem - how to best organise work to capture knowledge wherever it happens in an organisation - is less emotionally charged than issues of competition for power (or hierarchy or authority) and is actually something a lot more prosaic?

The West got pretty good at doing things because it was able to break down concepts and operationalise them by creating ever-more-specialised roles for people. Greater specialisation leads to greater productivity, goes the theory. And that takes you pretty far. Atomic bomb, man on the Moon, yada yada yada.

But - as the HBR article posits - ideas don’t just come from specialist idea-makers. If competitive advantage is now to be derived from wringing every drop of innovation out of all your people, how do you get it and still keep people in their jobs? What if the shop floor middle manager, the cleaning staff or the receptionist has the killer idea?

All great in theory, but generally these flashes of insight from the periphery are non-recurring events. Not every workplace is so fabulously profitable and productive that it can afford to let its employees spend 20% of their time working on individual projects like Google.

So in the non-Google world of work, how do you capture these ideas - without encouraging people to spend all day on the company wiki to win a nominal prize instead of, y’know, doing their job? What about a workplace famously so lean and mean that you’re not allowed to charge your mobile phone and you have to buy your own pens, like Ryanair? How can it be made to work at a place built on ruthlessly efficient specialisation to maximise near-term profit?

If feeling valued is an important part of motivating, how can you make everybody feel their (non-specialist) contributions are valued when most of them aren’t valuable, most of the time?