Knowledge and Organizational Learning

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Community of practice is an effective way of knowledge sharing and a part of the organization knowledge management methodologies to enhance the overall organization performance and credibility in the market. It also helps maintaining relationship and connection between the employees which is a part of the “Social Capital” as per E. L. Lesser and J. Storck (2001, P833). It can be considered as an effective way to enhance the Intellectual Capital (IC) of the organization

“Community of practice surely remains a useful ideal type of social relation” Andrew Cox (2009, P533). This show how community of practice affect the social capital of the organization, and this social capital as relationship between people who worked in the same environment enhance the organization performance same like the Intellectual Capital.

Stemke (2004) identifies three types of networks in organizations, the First is the community of practice which is links people with similar responsibilities, allowing members to find solutions to problems and to come up with new practices to adopt for the future. The second type of networks are groups which focus on processes and have a formal structure of delivering the shared purpose. These networks are mostly observed in businesses where clear deliverables are set and where systems exist to measure the performance of the set goals. The third type of networks is made of groups which provide expertise to a specific unit or structure in the organization

Social capital through community of practice keep the people aligned and connected which provide a higher organization performance as stated before, Ackoff (2015) gives an example to these harmonized systems by cars as he said that if we took the best part of each car model and put them together this wont gives a perfect car. However, it may not result on having a car at all as these parts did not fit together. Community of practice within the organization helps in enhancing this harmony between the people.

Balanced Scorecard

Brian Jacobs (2004) defined the balanced scorecard as “A Balanced Scorecard ‘integrates measures derived from strategy o managers can guide an organization to achieve results under a balance of related management perspectives”. So balance scorecard is the tool of measurement used by the organizations’ management to measure the development and progress of their employees.

In my organization the balance scorecard is divided into two parts, the first part is related to the work targets and achievements related to business like sales and business development and this represent seventy percent of the balance scorecard values, the other thirty percent is related to knowledge gaining, learning and trainings in order to show to the employees which ae the human capital of the organization how important is to enhance their knowledge and abilities to learn.

This keeps the employees on the learning and knowledge track and also this balance scorecard is a way for the management to manage the knowledge and organization learning and give advantages to those who work hard to gain and enhance them.

Soft System Thinking

Ackoff (2015) describes the system by giving examples of human biological systems showing that the system consists of many parts like lungs, heart, brain and etc. that work together to perform the human biological system performance so he stated that " the system as whole that contain two more parts each of which can affect the properties or behavior of the whole".

From this definition he described that these parts consisting the system can not do what the whole system does. However, the interrelation between the whole system perform the ability for the system they are forming the ability to do its job. The success of this system did not depend on the performance of each individual part forming the system. However, the harmony between this part does this.

Exactly as the car example we stated before that was described by Ackoff (2015) that if we bring some mechanical engineers and ask them to tell us what is the best about each car model like Mercedes, BMW, Volkswagen and Rolls-Roys they can tell us exactly what is the most powerful part on each automobile which is considered a separate system. His example assumed that if those engineers were asked to assemble an automobile consisting of all the powerful parts in each different car the result system wont be a high performance system and that because there will be a lack of harmony between these parts we collected from various different systems.

System thinking is defined as how to think systematically and give a great attention to the interaction happened between the system parts which may be complicated and non predictable due to the parts difference in way of working and putting in mind the environment that is surrounding this system and how it affects this. This is exactly like what Reisman A. and Oral M. (2005, P165) stated about system thinking that it must include paying attention to the interaction between the resources and the environment surrounding this system and in which the system operates.

Organizations are systems consisting of different parts that can be subdivided into departments and also these departments are consisting of people which are different in their way of thinking, working and even they are coming from different environments. So it is applicable to apply the system definition to any organization and as it become huge it becomes more complicated and sophisticated.

System thinking comes to be the way to think how to deal with this complicated environment as not to loose the system harmony and smooth way of interaction. Soft System Methodology is always used to enhance the problems occurred due to lots of human actions within the organization.

Soft system thinking is a way that use logic and knowledge to define what is good and go towards it rather than searching for the problem root cause Stuart B. (2015, 14) and this what make the soft system thinking a way that depends on knowledge and intellectual capital of any organization as the knowledge give the hand to find the good way to go forward and to enhance and achieve also the intellectual capital as a whole with its relation to the community of practice and the enhancement it did to the social capital affect the soft system thinking methodology to use it to go forward rather than going deep in the problem to find its root cause and solve it. In another words we can say that soft system thinking is more a problem avoiding technique rather than a problem solving technique and it is mainly based on the organization knowledge.

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