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82 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

between the parties, then sharing knowledge will be very problematic. We explore
this issue of trust later in this chapter.

>> CREATING SYNERGY WITHIN TEAMS

Cross-functional team-working within organizations is often portrayed as the key
to creativity and success for firms today and there is a long tradition in psychological
research on team-working demonstrating how ‘the whole may be more than the
sum of the parts’; in other words, how a diverse range of individuals can create,
through synergy, ideas which go beyond what any single individual could have
produced individually. Similarly in the ‘Knowledge Management’ literature,
where there is an emphasis on knowledge creation, collaboration, interaction
and team-working are seen to be crucial. For example, the knowledge creation
model developed by Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) puts heavy emphasis on social
processes of dialogue and interaction. Thus, three of the four key processes in their
SECI model (socialization, externalization, combination and internalization)
that depicts how knowledge is created in organizations through the conversion
between tacit and explicit knowledge involve social processes: socialization,
externalization and combination (see Chapter 1 for fuller description of the SECI
model). In other words, most of the processes that are described in the model
depend on dialogue and interaction over a prolonged period. Occasional contact
between members of different departments, customers or clients is not enough,
they argue, because this does not allow for the sharing of tacit knowledge that
is essential for knowledge creation. Instead, interactions must occur over a
prolonged period within what they describe as an enabling context. As we saw
in Chapter 1, Nonaka and Konno (1998) call this enabling context ‘ba’. Ba
may well involve a physical space where face-to-face interaction can occur, but
can also involve virtual space (e.g. using e-mails, intranets, video conferencing,
blogs, social networking) and most importantly it involves developing a shared
mental space (shared experiences, emotions, ideas).
The classic example provided by Nonaka of this need for social interaction
was of developing an automatic bread-making machine. The project team who
were trying to develop this new technology came up with numerous prototypes
but none of them was actually very successful in creating bread to the quality
produced by bakers. One member of the project team then decided to go and
actually work with a master bread baker to try and understand what he did
to make quality bread. From this, we are told, the project member came to
understand how the baker was ‘twisting’ the dough in a particular way and
his communication of this insight back to the other project members allowed
them to subsequently develop an effective automatic bread-maker. Through
observation and practice (socialization) the project member was able to acquire
the tacit knowledge of the bread-maker that the bread-maker was not able to
himself make explicit.
The central idea here, then, is that creativity develops from the interac-
tion of people with different knowledge sets or as Dougherty (1992) calls

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