Creativity, chaos and knowledge management

Abstract

With the dynamic and turbulent nature of today's business environment, organizations have to manage under uncertain, or chaotic, circumstances. This article examines the connection between the management of an organization's knowledge and chaos theory in order to understand what implications chaos brings to knowledge management. It uses two industry cases to illustrate both the challenges and opportunities.

How a museum knows? Structures, work roles, and infrastructures of information work

“…Exhibition building, and especially the summer festival, can be described as Bakhtinian (Bakhtin, ) carnivalesques, which subverted and liberated assumptions of routine work roles. The employees, who normally tended to communicate only with their closest colleagues and hold to their routines and established social norms of the workplace, were suddenly engaged in an intensive temporary social exchange, in the terms of Smith and Paquette (), a form of temporary, creative chaos. The interviews suggest that the regular staff meetings were intended to function as occasions when everyone could have the equal opportunity to have a say.…”

Situational appropriation of information

“…Similarly to how the adoption of the ICTs to fit in particular cultural settings with distinct characteristics and societal needs has been described as a situational appropriation rather than a reception of commodity (Feyten & Nutta, 1999, p. 3), we argue that the exploitation of information is not necessarily best described only as a human-centric processes of finding, receiving and 'using' information, bricolage (Baker & Nelson, 2005;Garud & Karnøe, 2003), creativity (e.g., Smith & Paquette, 2010;Saulais & Ermine, 2012;Kuhlthau, 2008), innovation (e.g., Esterhuizen et al, 2012;Iacono et al, 2012), or in more general sense sagacity (Cunha et al, 2010), bisociation (e.g., Dubitzky et al, 2012;Garud & Karnøe, 2003), Sense-Making (Dervin, 2003) or learning. The notions of creativity and bisociation foreground arbitrary associations, bricolage and improvisation focus on somewhat different aspects of the reuse and reorganisation of information, sagacity and Sense-Making the cognitive dimension of the information processing, and innovation the significance of the generation of new ideas from the human point of view, but none of the approaches is specific about that what happens to information when it becomes informational in a particular context.…”

“…Savolainen (2009b) notes that much of the recent discussion on these topics in information disciplines is characterised by a certain propensity for constructivism in a broad sense of the term. The specific moment when something happens has been discussed in more specific terms, for instance, as bricolage (Baker & Nelson, 2005;Garud & Karnøe, 2003), creativity (e.g., Smith & Paquette, 2010;Saulais & Ermine, 2012;Kuhlthau, 2008), sagacity (Cunha et al, 2010), bisociation (e.g., Dubitzky et al, 2012;Garud & Karnøe, 2003) and innovation (e.g., Esterhuizen et al, 2012;Iacono et al, 2012). Even if the scope of these latter types of studies vary, they have a strong tendency to focus on extreme cases of sagacity, for instance, in science and scholarship (e.g., Andel, 1994) and business innovation (Bean & Radford, 2001).…”

“…"resourcefulness and improvisation on the part of involved actors" (Garud & Karnøe, 2003), creativity (e.g. Smith & Paquette 2010;Saulais & Ermine 2012;Kuhlthau 2008;George 2007, "related to the capacities which allow ideas generation" Saulais & Ermine, 2012), sagacity (keenness of insight) (Koh, 2000;Cunha et al, 2010), bisociation (a capability to "join unrelated, often conflicting, information in a new way" Dubitzky et al e.g., 2012) and, for instance, innovation (e.g., Esterhuizen et al, 2012;Iacono et al, 2012), defined by Baregheh et al (2009Baregheh et al ( , p. 1334 as "multi-stage process whereby organizations transform ideas into new/improved products, service or processes, in order to advance, compete and differentiate themselves successfully in their marketplace".…”

“We’ve got a better situation”: the life and afterlife of virtual communities in Google Lively

“…The methods used by the community of Livelians have many similarities with the behaviour of the user communities of other virtual worlds (e.g. Pearce and Artemesia, 2009;Smith and Paquette, 2010) and also physically based examples of virtual collective action (e.g. Mele, 1999).…”