 Welcome back to the knowledge clips of the book Evidence-Based Human Resource Management. What do we know about people in workplaces? In this clip and the coming two clips, I will talk about Chapter 3 about knowledge management. And in this first clip, I will introduce the concept of knowledge. And then in the clips thereafter, I will zoom in to individual and organizational learning. So after this clip, you will understand the following. First, the importance of knowledge for human capital. I will give you a definition of knowledge. I will discuss different types of knowledge, which is really important, and different levels of knowledge. So the third and fourth points are kind of the pre-work that you need to understand the rest of the chapter. So we departed from human capital and we provided this definition. Human capital is all the knowledge, skills, ideas, abilities and health available in people working in an organization. And we just assume that we know what knowledge is. But do you? What is knowledge? Actually that's quite a difficult question. It has kept philosophers from ancient Greeks, from the ancient Greeks already busy to try and answer this question. I do not claim that I will provide you the answer about what is knowledge in this lecture. I will give a definition that we can work with and that can help us to understand how knowledge in organizations works. And to end with this definition, I first need to explain to you what knowledge is not. So what is knowledge not? Sometimes knowledge is confounded with information. Information are basically everything that is available like in data, basic information, observations of work activities. These can all be quantified in some way or another. However, until somebody starts using this information and starts to think how this information may contribute to doing something and to interpret this information, only then there is meaning added to information. And this adding meaning, the action of putting information into use and perform and innovate, that is what we can see as knowledge. So quite straightforward definition of knowledge is actually the putting information in action. So information has little value until it is given meaning and used in our case on the job. If you go to the academic literature, you see that there is a bigger first made of it. So it's not just using information, it's a little bit deeper. I'm going to present you a well-known definition by Nona Kavankoch, 2009, nice overview article, of which the first two elements are rather philosophical, but the last one is really, really important and has a lot of practical implications. And that's why it is important for you to understand this definition. So the first part of the definition is that knowledge is a justified true belief. What does it mean? It means that individuals and groups justify the truthfulness of their beliefs based on their interactions with the world. For example, I believe it will be called today. I can easily justify this belief by just either sticking my head out a window or looking up information about the weather forecast and then I justify this belief. So knowledge, I know it is called today, is because I can check it. I looked it up. The second part of the definition is that this knowledge is important and why is it important? Because it allows humans to define, prepare, shape and learn to solve a task or problem. So the two explanations that come after that, they shed a little bit light on what this means. So any situation can be interpreted as a situation where you need knowledge to come to some conclusion. So for example, if you enter the plane, you probably not walk to the front seats where the pilots are seated because you know it takes skill and knowledge to be able to fly a plane. So it defines a situation where you need knowledge in order to perform that task. You need to be a pilot to know to operate a plane. The second part is the potentiality of defining a situation as to permit skillful action. So to put simple, you look at a task and you know I have the knowledge I can do this or you look at a task and you think this is not for me. So one side, you look at a task and you know it needs somebody who knows about this or you look yourself at a task and you say I can do it because I have the knowledge or I can't. Okay, still is this practically relevant? Well, probably, but the last bit of the definition is definitely practically relevant and that is the distinction between explicit and tacit knowledge. Nonaka and Van Kroeg added to our understanding of knowledge the distinction between explicit knowledge or tacit knowledge and I'll explain what it is on the next slide. Explicit knowledge means all the knowledge that is well explained and that can be stored and transmitted by means of books or on the Internet or you can just look it up. It means that it's visible for us and it's also easy to understand that it is knowledge. That is what we typically see if we go to a classroom and people explain the facts to us, then they transmit knowledge to us. So knowing about things, knowing about facts, the what, knowing about employment laws, knowing about language, knowing the words that you need in order to speak another language. These are the things that you can find as explicit parts of knowledge. Also procedures, for example, if we talk about a language, the grammar that is there so that all the rules and procedures that you need to put a word in a proper sequence in a sentence. This is no Y example of explicit knowledge. And this is oftentimes the knowledge that we associate with going to school. This is where you learn this explicit knowledge. However, the ability to perform skillful action is not only about knowing what you see. To go back to this example about flying a plane, you can know all about the buttons and you can know all about the flight procedures. But still, you probably want some practice before you actually go out and fly a plane. And there it becomes more fuzzy what you know exactly. And that is what we call tacit knowledge. Tacit means that it's implicit knowledge, uncodified. It's not written down. But it means, for example, for being this pilot, that it might be a good idea to introduce yourself to your co-pilot before you start actually doing things, that you check a little bit what they know, or that in a certain plane, the buttons are in a slightly different position. It doesn't really matter. You can do it a little bit different. This is all this trial and error knowledge that you learn through practicing, just by observing others, by seeing what works best rather than knowing the facts. This is oftentimes so implicit that you don't even realize yourself that it is knowledge. So imagine yourself, and this is probably for Dutch students. So all Dutch students can ride a bike. And sometimes exchange students, they come over and they didn't ride bikes that often, or they have never ridden a bike before. And imagine that you would have to explain to somebody else how to ride a bike. You probably will not say, I'll have a look at the internet and good luck. You'll probably also not say, here's a book. You'll probably tell this person that you have to practice, and maybe you first demonstrate. And then the funny thing comes, it's so much automated to the people who can ride a bike that it's sometimes even hard to put on the words what it actually means, what you do when you ride a bike. So the tested part of knowledge is the knowledge that you're not aware of. It's the part that is implicit. You have, sometimes it's so logical to the ones that own it, that it's hard to explain, to know how. And also, and we talked about social capital before, if you're new to an organization, after it takes quite some time to know who you really need if you have a problem. So this knowing who and knowing who knows what in networks is also an example of tested knowledge. If I explain it like this, it should become obvious that both parts of knowledge, both the explicit and the tested knowledge matter for performance. So in organizations, this kind of knowledge resides on two levels. Individuals have knowledge, so they have their diplomas and their test explicit knowledge, but they also know about how things are done best and they know about who to reach. And a characteristic of knowledge is that it's stored in the minds of individuals. So if you think back, we discussed how resources are non-transferable because they are in individuals, right? If you have an individual, you take them out and you do something with that resource. But with knowledge, there's also something strange happening because it is possible that I take the knowledge that is in my mind and put it in somebody else's mind by means of talking about it, demonstrating. I can share my knowledge so that other people also have knowledge. So that means as organizations, although the knowledge is stored in the heads of individuals, organizations also have knowledge. There's this shared understanding of how things work best. It is this shared understanding of how things work best. This is the tacit knowledge that exists at the level of the organization. Another aspect that we discussed previously is that knowledge, as part of the human capital like Gary Becker defined it, is prone to losing its value when it's not invested in. So if a pilot is not practicing flying with some regularity, he will lose the tacit knowledge but also the understanding of the newest technology of flight, which means that his license to fly at some point is not valid anymore. And the same is true in organizations. So if people leave and there's nothing is organized to make sure that there is a transfer between the people who are in the organization still and the one who is leaving, that this knowledge is not lost. So knowledge is an important part of human capital. However, it needs to be nurtured and developed both in individuals and in organizations. So these two things learning by individuals and knowledge development in organizations will be the content of clip number seven and clip number eight. For now it's most important to remember that knowledge is a fundamental part of human capital. That knowledge means putting information into action in a practical definition. Moreover, that some of this knowledge use depends on knowledge being either explicit or tacit and that although knowledge resides in individuals and it leaves with them if they leave the organization, it is possible to share knowledge between people and therefore knowledge can also be a part of groups and organizations. So we can talk about group or organization knowledge. This is it for now. Thank you.