First and foremost, knowledge creation is primarily dependent on the individual. Its quality depends on the variety of the individual’s experience and the knowledge of experience; thus ‘the embodiment (body and mind brought together) of knowledge through a deep personal commitment into bodily experience‘.

To bring personal knowledge into a social context within which it can be amplified, it is necessary to have a “field” that provides a place in which individual perspectives are articulated, and conflicts are resolved in the formation of higher-level concepts.

The self-organizing team triggers organizational knowledge creation through two processes:

• it facilitates the building of trust; this occurs through sharing the individual original experience
• the shared implicit perspective is conceptualized through continuous dialogues; dialogue in the form of face-to-face communication between persons is a process in which one builds concepts in cooperation with others and test hypotheses; interaction rhythms are both of of simultaneity and sequence

The team’s findings become crystallized through being double checked with other departments; justification comes nest as a process of final convergence; finally, the concept crystallized and justified is integrated into the org knowledge base with the aim to reorganize it.

the three enabling conditions for individual commitment:

• creative chaos: perceived in its interaction with cosmos in a circular process and then becomes a cosmos; creative chaos is generated in crisis or intentionally by proposing challenging goals; chaos creates tension; tension is followed by reflection;
• redundancy of information: conscious overlapping of info; it provides a vehicle for problem generation; helps individuals to recognize their location in the org which in turn increases their sense of control and direction;
• requisite variety: the constructing of information process channels
  that match the information load imposed by the environment; an organization can maximize efficiency by creating within itself the same degree of diversity as the diversity it must process.

References

Nonaka, I., 1994, A Dynamic Theory of Organizational Knowledge Creation, Organization Science, Vol. 5, No. 1. (Feb., 1994), pp. 14-37.

Images available here