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The Role of Organizational Culture 249

Box 7.2
(continued)

Itinerant employees are provided with laptops so that they can stay connected at all
times.
Tools are only one side of the equation however — Buckman believes that tools can only
act as facilitators — the company culture has to provide a good environment in which to
use these tools. The most important cultural factor in KM is that of trust. Each employee
must trust the other before they provide information to them. A distinctive feature at
Buckman is that the focus is on direct communication between individual employees in
order to minimize distortion and misunderstanding of the knowledge content.
Finally, Buckman freely shares its experience and expertise in KM with other organiza-
tions. Companies like AT & T and 3M have visited them to benchmark their internal KM
processes.

In most cases, individuals making decisions and solving problems do not question
their basic assumptions (underlying mental models). They simply use them, without
thinking, and arrive at a decision or solution to their problem. If the solution does
not work, they most likely question the inputs to their decision and attempt to make
a better decision next time. Argyris and Schon (1978, 1996) refer to this type of learn-
ing as single-loop learning. In some cases, the individual or group actually begins to
question the basic assumptions and models underlying the decision, which is called
double-loop learning. It is through double-loop learning that changes in shared mental
models take place. When attempting to change the shared mental models of a group,
it is important to take time out from the day-to-day problem-solving processes to
outline, challenge, and agree on changes to the shared mental model.
Most programs for changing culture inside of companies do not work because they
address content (the knowledge, structure, and data in a company) or process (the
activities and behaviors), but they never address the context in which both of those
elements reside. The sources of people ’ s actions are not what they know, but how they
perceive the world around them. Context can be an individual ’ s mind-set or the
organizational culture. It includes all of the assumptions and norms that are brought
to the table. Context is perception, as opposed to facts or data. People do not go off
and design their context — they just inherit it. Culture is also socially constructed and
refl ects meanings that are constituted in interaction and that form commonly accepted
defi nitions of the situation.
Culture is symbolic, which is why it is best described by telling stories about how
we feel about the organization. A symbol stands for something more than itself and