Mopsos

The minute you systematize something, you suck the life out of it…nobody asks questions any more – questions such as ‘why is it done this way?’ ‘Has the world changed in the interim?’ ‘Can it be done better now?’

Paul Burdick - AES

KM lies in the human practice. It is about finding good ways of doing things. Quality lies in the organizational process. It is about deploying good ways of doing things.

Oftentimes, managers think they know and subordinates don't, so they bet on processes to "deploy" their thoughts. I only know of one company where the two apparently meet: Toyota. On Toyota's production system, processes are systematically analyzed and documented down to the individual human practice. Every single change in the human practice of car assembly is systematically tested and experimented before it becomes industrialized in a process. And if the process turns out to be wrong, the line is stopped so that people can immediately investigate the cause and correct it or return to a previous "safe" process.

As John Seely Brown puts it:"It's like a ballet". And the manufacturing machine turns into a form of art.

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