Peter: I would agree with you and in fact part of my other life is I help support that co-creative process – community engaged research – community based research and in a previous life I was the program officer that piloted the CURA Program, the Community University Research Alliance Program. I'm completely sympathetic to what you're saying. One of the challenges that people keep pushing at that idea is saying it takes too much time, it takes too much energy, I'm not rewarded for that and what I'm hearing is we don't have a culture that supports this kind of co-creation – this kind of research to action – action to research process. If we were to shift the culture, what are some of the elements of that cultural shift that would allow our institutions and sectors to work together better?
Robert: Well I think that our funding institutions are key in this aspect. I think our funding institutions have to recognize the importance of co-creation of knowledge. Our funding institutions have to insist that our researchers present, along with their proposal, a project or an approach to how they are going to go about co-creating and transferring knowledge and if that's incorporated within the plan then I think that will hopefully encourage researchers to get a little bit more…to pay more attention to knowledge transfer and to co-creation. Another factor also Peter that I think needs to be addressed when we're talking about researchers and how they relate to the practice community, we have in Canada an excellent tradition of research and even of knowledge transfer research especially in health care and education – a lot of people are doing excellent research work in those areas, however funding institutions have a long tradition of operating from a relatively positivistic paradigm so what they're asking researchers to do is to measure the results. When we were talking about evidence earlier, typically when you talk to funding organizations, they're looking at how do we measure? How do we mechanistically break something down and measure it?
And if we're talking about knowledge transfer and if we're primarily talking about second order knowledge transfer, which I'd be happy to describe to you a little bit later, then I think that that entire focus on measurement and on positivistic approach, I think if we continue to insist on those requirements then I think we're going to exclude a whole bunch of researchers, and a whole bunch of people who are out there looking at trying to understand knowledge transfer from a different perspective and I'm not sure how our traditional organizations - funding organizations are prepared to look at those types of proposals. I know for example, in my world, I get asked regularly, “oh Robert we want to do some…” by funding agencies they say “we want to do some participative action research or some action research” and so when I prepare proposals to do participative action research, almost every time it gets rejected or turned down because, “oh that isn't research as we understand it”. And I think we're really going to need a major paradigm shift on the part of funding organizations and on the part of traditional positivistic researchers who are going to have to open up the approaches to research. You talked earlier about learning history – learning history is a very positive, solid, social construction approach to doing research. Well up until now, we've had a lot of difficulty convincing funding agencies that it's an appropriate mechanism. So I think we're kind of bucking the system Peter, by asking these organizations to really do something different but I think that if I rely on what Meadows and Robinson said in 2002 if the system is behaving badly, consistently over a long period of time and in spite of many variations in surrounding condition, then something more than marginal tinkering is required to bring about improvement. Peter: Well it's interesting that you say that, Manuel Castell's, a number of years ago wrote that networks are the new social morphology of our society but our institutions are ill prepared to deal with them. Robert: Yes absolutely. I agree 100% with that.
Peter: And so do you think this is actually a part of a shift to a more networked society?
Robert: Oh absolutely. It's a shift to a different paradigm. It's a shift to a social paradigm, in which people beginning to see the value of interactions – social interactions – the value of things like these podcasts and other similar things and I see a major shift taking place at least in organizations. I really can't talk about in the education field or health care but in organizations I think there's a major shift underway and up until a short time ago every time I was asked how much time it would take for that shift to take place, I used to say probably a generation. I'm a little bit more optimistic than that right now. What I'm seeing as a result of the high dollar and the financial changes taking place in Canada and what's happening to some of our organizations – I believe our organizations are being forced to pay a lot more attention to things like networking and how do we better network. Peter: Okay. So we're more connectable than ever before but not necessarily more connected? Robert: Exactly.
Peter: Okay. What are…you've mentioned some of the challenges but I'm wondering if you can elaborate on those challenges and you also talked about second order knowledge transfer. If you can perhaps deal with that first and then we'll talk about challenges and then I'd like you to follow up the challenges with rewards because I think that because there's so many people working on this, there's so much energy going into it – I mean there's a lot of positive energy, a lot of enthusiasm for this because I think that people see rewards. If you can just talk about what those would be?
Robert: I'll do my best. In terms of second order knowledge transfer, what I was referring to is that up until now, most of the work that has been done in knowledge transfer and exchange has taken, what I refer to as a reductionist or mechanistic view that I alluded to earlier and basically what that does is it assumes that knowledge can be reduced to it's constituent parts. Then it can be optimized and fitted together again to achieve a desired outcome. For example in health care, workers are expected to be like structural engineers or Formula 1 mechanics of the human body.
In some cases this works fine; if I have a broken arm and I go in and they repair my arm and that's fine but it's no longer sufficient. First order of knowledge transfer where we reify knowledge; we try to turn knowledge into something that's codified - that can be written down – that becomes explicit. Second order of knowledge transfer and this is where most of our work at the laboratory is done, is work on the more tacit types of knowledge and this implies that fundamental shift of paradigm and we've used knowledge transfer and exchange more as a dynamic process with multiple feedback loops. First order typically as I understand it used knowledge that is linear from a producer of knowledge to a translator to a user of that knowledge. In second order of knowledge transfer what we are finding is that in fact, everyone is a user of knowledge and everyone is also a producer of knowledge and everyone can be a translator of knowledge.
In reality all human actors are constantly engaged in thought and hence are engaged in sense making and interpretation at every instance. For example you and I during this interview are going to be different at the end of this interview – our knowledge base is going to have changed at the end of this interview compared to what it was at the beginning. And it's the same thing with my students; I've gotten to the point with most of my students, and I'm fortunate to teach primarily at the Masters and Doctoral level, I learn as much if not more from my students than they do from me because of that exchange process. So that phenomenon of constant thought and action means that there's a perpetual regeneration of knowledge and in that context it becomes difficult to just look at explicit knowledge because explicit knowledge that's been codified – that's been if you would, gelled into either a book or a database or a podcast or something of that nature is fine but it doesn't capture that evolution that's going on in my mind – in your mind, while we're having this discussion – while your listeners are going to be listening to it – what changes that's going to imply for them. What we believe second order of knowledge transfer implies for people is that we need to focus a lot of our research a lot more on a systems-based approach to knowledge. We need to look at relationships between people - we need to look at knowledge boundaries, we need to look at the emergence of new knowledge, we need to look at time delays, generic behaviors, networking. That sort of language is what we find most of all in second order knowledge transfer. So what we're saying is that organizations – and remember I'm in a business school – that organizations really have to develop into what we refer to as complex adaptive systems. To be able to deal with those second order issues. In other words we have to create a context of trust – a culture of trust and participation that allows people to manage all of those changes in their environment.
Peter: Okay. One of the challenges when I was a SSHRC, you know people would talk about researchers and research users, yet when you do an analysis of citation indexes well who using the research? Its other researchers so you can't be both, right? Robert: Right Peter: You have multiple roles in a process so there's that research process, a dissemination process, an implementation process, an evaluation process and that anyone individual can play many different roles in those multiple processes. Robert: Absolutely, and in fact what we do with our…the article you were reading about our model on the dynamic knowledge exchange model, is that we're saying that in fact no one individual is expected to play all of those roles, that the system has those capacities - the system that we're looking at, be it health care or my organization or IBM has to have the ensemble of capacities necessary for knowledge transfer. But we also understand that no one individual can have all of those capacities.
Peter: So what are the greatest challenges of developing an environment that supports those kinds of complex adaptive systems?
Robert: That's a great question Peter. I would say some of the….the big challenges are to encourage a climate of trust, a celebration of diversity between researchers and practitioners. I think we have to, again I'm going to come back to some of the things we mentioned earlier, we have to be able to encourage people to take risk, we have to be willing to live with risk, we have to be willing to deal with a little bit of chaos, a little bit of non-control. We have to shift our focus towards creativity and innovation rather than control and measurement.
Peter: So what are the rewards from doing this? If you can imagine a system where we're actually doing this, how will our society look different? How will the community that we live in look different? How will the places that we work look different?
Robert: I think that that's a tough one to answer. Peter let me just tell you what I am seeing with our students. Most of our educational system in the past has been built on a mechanistic approach where the teacher has – possesses all kinds of knowledge and he stands before his students and he gives them that knowledge and then at the end of the session the teacher asks the students to give him back that knowledge in roughly the same words that the teacher used and most of our educational systems that people I deal with have experience with, are those types of systems where… probably you have the same type of schooling where when you were in school Peter where the teacher tells you what's important and then he asks you, now tell me what's important and you have to tell him or her what he's already told you was important. What we're finding today in a lot of our classrooms is that in fact we've done away with that entirely and we're co-creating knowledge amongst ourselves. What that means is that the professor brings to the table a lot of the history of knowledge in a particular area but then through dynamic discussions with students they look at how do we apply this in real world settings in the future? What does that mean to me? How does that impact on me? And how do I think that's going to help us in the future to better help serve the needs of organizations? That approach that we're creating with our students is one where rather than asking them to answer specific questions and to respond to specific questions and stimulus, what we're really doing is trying to get them to be as creative and as imaginative as possible – what we're looking for them to do is to be able to be part of the solution rather than just describing a problem. We're looking at getting them fully engaged in the process of managing their organizations and I think that's probably going to be the biggest payoff for our organizations and for our society is people are going to be considerably more engaged than they have been in the past. Peter: Given this trend, in ten years, where do you expect knowledge transfer, knowledge exchange to be?
Robert: I think that if we stay at the first order of knowledge transfer, where we view knowledge as an object that has to be transferred, I think in ten years we probably won't be talking much about it. I think it will have been seen as a fad – obviously everyone is going to be, including myself, very grateful for what information – what IT has allowed us to do and has given us access to but I think we're going to be elsewhere in the way we're dealing with our organizations and dealing with change within our organizations. Whereas if second order knowledge transfer takes hold, and I think we're going to be creating a society that is much richer both in terms of financial wealth but also in terms of relational wealth – relationship wealth, in terms of trust, in terms of pleasures of working together, in terms of the challenges we face together. I'm extremely positive about the future Peter and the future of knowledge transfer Peter: Robert, merci beaucoup. Robert: My pleasure.
