Supporting the Complexity of Inquiring Organizations

This chapter examines the issue of technological support for inquiring organizations and suggests that the complexity of these organizations is best supported by a technology of equal complexity—that is, by agent technology. Agents and the complex systems in which they are active are ideal for supporting not only the activity of Churchman’s inquirers but also those components necessary to ensure an effective environment. Accordingly, a multiagent system to support inquiring organizations is introduced. By explaining agent technology in simple terms and by defining inquirers and other components as agents working within a multiagent system, this chapter demystifies agent technology, enables researchers to grasp the complexity of inquiring organization support systems, and provides the foundation for inquiring organization support systems design.

Inquiring Organizations

This chapter describes each of Churchman’s inquirers as a process and how each can be perceived as an organizational form. By combining the forms suited to each inquirer, we show how an integrated organizational form founded on the inquirers can support an entire inquiring organization and how this form may be used to facilitate organizational learning and the creation and management of knowledge. We have laid the foundation of organizational form perspective for researchers and believe this foundation will enable researchers to investigate organizational learning, knowledge management, and communication processes within the complexity of inquiring organizations.

Avoiding Epistemological Myopia

Organizational approaches to knowledge management are unlikely to lead to organizational wisdom unless the organization increases its awareness of factors that contribute to epistemological myopia—a nearsightedness that limits what and how the organization knows and how it learns. Contributors to this myopia include organizational learning pathologies, an unquestioning acceptance of fundamental concepts, such as time, and measuring success as the absence of failure. In many instances, the vocabulary, language, and business methods used by an organization, society, or culture reify these pathological factors and thereby further hamper the potential for learning. By raising our awareness of these contributors and the factors that support their reification and continued acceptance, we seek either to avoid these limitations or to develop corrective lenses that can extend the organization’s vision and enable it to resolve issues with greater clarity. The conceptual frameworks used in this chapter are drawn from four distinct areas of study: systems theory, organizational knowledge and learning, the organization as a learning community and community of practice, and linguistic relativity. The underlying theme is the organization as an inquiring system—a system that seeks to learn and become more knowledgeable. Because learning processes are culturally biased, and the bias is reinforced by a culture’s values, language, and vocabulary, the premise is that these biases and values constrain the organization’s epistemological methods and processes. The potential solutions to epistemological myopia include deliberate nurturing of cultural diversity, the institutionalization of Singerian approaches to inquiry, and the fostering of managed risk in experiments that do not guarantee success. While few organizations exhibit all of these desirable characteristics, there are some examples from the literature and practice that provide confidence that organizations can avoid epistemological myopia.

Using Inquiring Practice and Uncovering Exformation for Information Systems Development

One of the oldest themes in information systems (IS) research concerns the relationship between developers and users of information systems. Over the years, IS scholars and IS practitioners have addressed the problem in a variety of ways, often focusing on how the use of social techniques can improve understanding between the two parties. Users, however, still find themselves working with systems, which do not match their requirements, needs, and expectations. We suggest that the problematic developer-user dynamic can be addressed by introducing an inquiring practice approach to information systems development. Consequently, this chapter conceptualizes a new way of understanding information systems development through the lenses of inquiring practice, Socratic dialogue, and the uncovering of exformation. We show that by applying this approach, we can enhance the inquiring capabilities of organizations, and thereby facilitate design and development of better information systems.

Exploiting Reusable Abstractions in Organizational Inquiry

This chapter shows how crucial aspects of organizational knowledge and organizational inquiry can be exactified using a relatively small number of abstract concepts common to various areas of human endeavor, such as (exact) philosophy, business management, science, and technology. Abstraction and exactification are essential for taming complexity in general and complexity of the modern-day organization in particular. Exactification is achieved, first and foremost, by creating and using ontologies—business and organizational domain models with precisely defined semantics. An ontology clearly demonstrates the fundamental concepts of a domain and relationships between them. The semantics of generic concepts used in effective modeling is based on mathematics and philosophy, while in too many cases a multitude of concepts invented in buzzword-compliant IT methods has no clear semantics and therefore cannot be reasonably used. Organizational learning and organizational inquiry can be understood and accomplished substantially better in the well-defined contexts of the domain ontologies that provide a foundation of organizational knowledge.

Kantian Inquiring Systems

Kantian inquiring systems can be used as a model for learning organizations. Based on Churchman’s (1971) inquiring systems and Courtney, Croasdell, and Paradice’s (1998) inquiring organizations, this chapter discusses the Kantian inquiring system and applies it to an organization in the retail industry. Kantian systems take input, process the input using multiple models, and interpret the data in terms of the best fitting model. Accepted output from the system is integrated into the system’s fact net. The guarantor of the system is the fit between the data and the model. The authors make recommendations in light of the Kantian inquiring system to the retail organization.

Mindfulness

In this chapter, mindfulness as an essential quality of integrated wisdom within inquiring organizations is discussed. A holistic, rather than a scientific view, of knowledge is adopted. The discussion is also underpinned by a pragmatic approach that incorporates rational, emotional, psychological, and spiritual perspectives. While multiple worldviews are considered, the discussion is situated in an integrated participatory paradigm. A plan for developing mindfulness within organizations is described that includes consideration of multilayered development and ordered, unordered, and disordered organizational arenas. Complexities abound when both individual and group maturity levels on developmental layers diverge widely. Integrated wisdom is only achieved when consensual alignment is achieved. Integrated wisdom allows for this complex mix, is aware of the appropriate level and type of communication and or interaction required, and acts accordingly without prejudice or judgment. Implications for the future of mindfulness as a necessary skill for integrated wisdom are also explored.

Inquiring Organizations and the Wisdom of Tacit Knowledge for a Heideggerian Inquiring System

C. West Churchman’s five inquiring systems are considered in the light of Polanyi’s distinction between tacit knowing and practical thinking. It is suggested that the five inquiring systems, as distinct and crucial elements of the learning organization, can be divided into two perspectives: the modes of tacit knowing and the levels of practical thinking. While practical thinking is of great importance to the day-to-day management and the analysis of past events of an organization, tacit knowing critically contributes to the sustainable growth and future direction of an organization through its connection with (1) intuition, (2) holism, and (3) ethics. As an example of tacit knowing, particularly in terms of ethics and intuition, a sixth inquiring system is proposed, namely, a Heideggerian inquiring system (HIS). What characterizes a HIS is, together with traditional methods of analysis of what is known, an organizational culture directed to the aim of discovering what is unknown in terms of products, markets, and competitive strategies and, most particularly, the capacities of organizational members. An existing real-world organizational example of an HIS is provided, examined, and discussed.

Knowledge Creation in Inquiring Organizations using KDD

Churchman (1971) emphasized the continual learning nature of organizations as part of their ontological fabric. Accordingly, he proffered the view of organizations as inquiring systems whose actions result in the creation of knowledge. To this end, many modern organizations have attempted to create knowledge by using technologies, such as Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD). Although quite powerful, these technologies depend heavily upon the skill and insights of the analyst. We propose that the role of the analyst in the application of these technologies is poorly understood. To advance our understanding in this regard, we dedicate the first part of this chapter to describing the KDD process and relate it to the five philosophical perspectives of organizational knowledge acquisition, as originally discussed by Churchman (1971). In the second part of the chapter, we draw parallels between the process of knowledge acquisition via KDD with the concept of information foraging (Pirolli & Card, 1999). Information foraging theory is offered as a research lens through which we can investigate the role of human judgment in KDD. These insights lead us to propose a number of areas for possible future research. Based on our insights into information foraging and knowledge creation, the chapter concludes by introducing a new organizational metaphor into corporate epistemology: inquiring organizations as knowledge foragers.

Email and Knowledge Creation

The real promise of organizational communication technologies may lie in their potential to facilitate participative discourse between knowledge workers at all levels in distributed locations and time zones. Such discourse enables the exchange of sometimes conflicting viewpoints through which resolution and symbiosis, organizational knowledge can be built. This chapter presents a case study of a Singerian inquiring organization which illustrates how a fluid dynamic community of employees can use email to build knowledge, learn, make decisions, and enhance wisdom through a cycle of knowledge combination (divergence) and knowledge qualification (convergence). The chapter offers new theoretical perspectives on the enhancement of wisdom in inquiring organizations and provides practical insights into the use of email for supporting effective knowledge creation in inquiring organizations.