Month: July 2024

As I was reading Catastrophe Ethics: How to Choose Well in a World of Touch Choices by Travis Rieder, the title of a children’s book I used to read to my children came to mind — The World Is Big and I’m So Small.

Yes, the world is big, and sadly, unlike in the children’s book, the problems cannot be solved by mythical knights with assistance from Mom and Dad. 

Yes, the problems are significant, and we as individuals are small—and we may not know what to do—but we must address them. A bioethicist at Johns Hopkins, Rieder, argues that the moral philosophy that has shaped humankind provides a framework for addressing the challenges of our times. Still, we need a revitalization of thinking and doing to confront what we face today.

The Puzzle

Rieder frames Catastrophe Ethics around a concept he calls “The Puzzle,” a framework for examining a problem of great consequence: climate change, abortion, and racism. As Rieder writes, “(1) a massive harm threatens, which makes moral stakes feel high; but (2) individuals are largely powerless to affect meaningful change; and so (3) this leads to passionate disagreement about what individuals are morally required to do.”

Here’s a thought problem: Would it be better to use funds for fine dining to alleviate hunger in distressed parts of the world? You say yes, certainly. But then what about the restauranteur, his staff, his suppliers and those who enjoy fine cuisine? Should we minimize their happiness to provide happiness to those who are starving?

You can argue both sides of the issue, and that’s the challenge this book presents. What one side advocates imperils the primacy of the other side’s argument. Few argue that climate change is a positive, yet responses to the problem often pit one side against the other. Your solution works for you but is harmful to me and my family.

“I try to make clear how often I’ve changed my own view,” Travis Rieder told me in a recent interview. “I spend my life thinking about ethics. It is my day job, it is my passion, and I’m constantly finding nuances and developing and being convinced by other thoughtful people who bring things to light.” Rieder says, “Even on things that we have the deepest disagreement, there is probably something that we can identify that is an insight… I really try to get people to search for those insights, to search for those shared starting points, to see the other people that they’re talking about not as evil or bad or deeply fallen, but instead as folks that are just starting from a different place.”

This issue became a stark relief when we saw climate activists storm the 18th hole at the Traveler’s tournament in Connecticut. As a golfer myself, I know the issue well. The activists view golf as detrimental to the planet in terms of chemicals used to control pests and the vast amounts of water needed to keep the courses green. And it’s a conundrum I wrestle with as an avid (not very good) golfer. I support golf as a participant and follower of the game as a Hobbesian choice.

As Rieder says, “One of the things that I want to say is I was taught by my mom a long time ago, be part of the solution and not part of the problem… What are the ways in which you can become part of a solution, which are the ways in which you can stop being part of the problem?”

Engage and Involve Yourself

The commitment to making a difference is the search for meaning, or more directly, the implementation of that search. Becoming involved in an issue that matters and engages the heart and mind is an exercise of agency, of being fully human. Our challenges today are sometimes existential – climate change, indeed – but so is our humanity. As a people, we have faced gigantic challenges, but we have survived because we used our most precious resource – our humanity – to face them. And we have survived.

The very conclusion describes how his book gets to the heart of the matter when we face. Ignoring the problem leads to “moral emptiness.

“But when we recognize that there is real goodness in responding to threats in different ways, than that we get to – and need to – participate in determining that response, we rescue our moral agency from the threat of nihilism. We build a meaningful life. This is the world of Catastrophe Ethics.”

Note: To view the full interview with Travis Rieder, click here.

First posted on Forbes.com 6.26.2024

A key to Japanese manufacturing prowess is kaizen, the discipline of continuous improvement grounded in worker involvement partnering with management to accomplish program goals. Inherent with kaizen is gemba, meaning “the actual place,” precisely where the work is done. When people design and build products convene, they exchange ideas, develop best practices, and share what they have learned. A term for such lessons is tacit knowledge, meaning the “knowledge behind the knowledge.”

Today tacit knowledge is less prevalent in management discussions than in the nineties. But that is changing. A recent Bartleby column in The Economist sketched the reason why. “All organisations face the problem of storing and transferring knowledge so that newcomers know what’s what, lessons are learned from successes and failures, and wheels are not constantly being reinvented. An ageing workforce adds to the urgency of training inexperienced hires before the old hands leave the building.”

Tacit Knowledge

Examples of tacit knowledge are what skilled tradespeople practice daily. A licensed electrician has passed the certification courses, but their actual knowledge is how to apply it to the workplace situation. That only comes from their apprenticeship and journeyman experiences. In short, you can read the diagram, but making it work requires expertise honed from experience. Electricians possess tacit knowledge.

Every discipline needs tacit knowledge. With such knowledge, things get done. 

One of the foremost thinkers in the area of tacit knowledge is Ikujiro Nonaka. “Tacit knowledge is personal, context-specific, and therefore hard to formalize and communicate,” wrote Nonaka. “Explicit or ‘codified’ knowledge, on the other hand, refers to knowledge that is transmittable in formal, systematic language.”

“By definition, tacit knowledge is knowledge that we aren’t aware we have. So it is hard to surface,” says Dan Denison, a founding partner of Denison Consulting and professor emeritus at IMD in Lausanne, “Ever hear the phrase, he (or she) has forgotten more than I’ll ever know? That’s an acknowledgment that someone has tacit knowledge that they aren’t aware of and that it is powerful.” 

In the mid-nineties, Denison was a visiting professor studying with Nonaka and his colleagues at Hitotsbashi University in Tokyo. He shares a story that Nonaka tells about what Mitsubishi when it was working on the development of bread-making machines. “The early ones burned the bread on the outside and left it gooey on the inside,” says Denison.

 Mitsubishi sent engineers to observe how pastry chefs worked. The engineers “discovered that the pastry chefs used a twisting and stretching technique, rather than just stirring up the dough.” The design team built a machine that could twist the dough, and it worked well. “Surfacing tacit knowledge often means using something like an apprentice model to get started.”

With Hirotakei Takeuchi, Nonaka developed the SECI model of knowledge transformation via socialization, externalization, combination, and internalization. The SECI model helps organizations translate their implicit knowledge into explicit knowledge that can be shared and practiced. [The Knowledge Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation is a seminal book on tacit knowledge.]

Addressing the Problem

With the Boomer generation exiting the workplace in droves, how can you ensure that you and your team embrace tacit knowledge? Here are some suggestions.

Create awareness. Tacit knowledge resides in the experience of those doing the job. For this reason, managers need to identify who on the team knows what and enable them to practice what they do best. 

Share it. Mentoring is a perfect way to disseminate knowledge. Tradesmen excel at doing this with on-the-job training. Junior technicians are paired with the veterans to learn “the right way” to do things. 

Improve upon it. Tacit knowledge is generative. It feeds upon itself. Once someone has gained the know-how to do the job, they can share and improve it. That practice is the key to learning within kaizen. Never is tacit knowledge more important than now as we integrate AI into our daily work processes. 

Make It Work

Tacit knowledge is not novel; it is not innovative in itself, but without it, innovation fails – or at least is much more complicated – because you are always starting from scratch, metaphorically redesigning the wheel by ignoring it is already there. 

Many organizations invite former employees to rejoin as consultants. This is a good solution in principle, but the challenge is to integrate the practice of tacit knowledge into daily management.

“In an economy where the one certain is uncertainty,” wrote Professor Nonaka, “the one sure source of lasting competitive advantage is knowledge.” Every organization’s challenge is to capture, nurture, and sustain that knowledge.

First posted on Forbes.com 3.20.24