Lucidea’s Lens: Knowledge Management Thought Leaders
Part 123 – Ikujiro Nonaka

The late Ikujiro Nonaka was a Japanese organizational theorist and Professor Emeritus at the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy of the Hitotsubashi University. He was a pioneer in creating the field of knowledge management and studying the impact of knowledge creation on product development and innovation. 

Nonaka-san’s primary research interest was to establish and disseminate the theory of knowledge-based management of companies, communities, public administration, and the nations, in order to facilitate ongoing, sustainable knowledge creation and innovation. As part of this work, he conducted comparative research on leaders and on knowledge-creating processes in companies and organizations, and of leaders, around the world. Accordingly, he was known globally as the ‘guru’ of Knowledge-based Management, having proposed concepts and theories on organizational knowledge creation processes and leadership since the 1980s.

His academic works included the SECI Model for the organizational knowledge creating process, the concept of Ba and the dynamic model of organizational knowledge creation process, the concept and abilities of wise leadership and phronesis (practical wisdom), and historical imagination and idealistic pragmatism. 

Here are definitions for five of Nonaka-san’s specialties

• Ba: A shared space for emerging relationships. It can be a physical, virtual, or mental space. 
• Idealistic Pragmatism: Synthesizes: 
• • Ontology: How to be – the vision of the future and the commitment to it. 
  • Epistemology: How to know – the SECI spiral that synthesizes objective and subjective views. 
  • Creation: How to change oneself and the environment. 
• Knowledge Creation: Inventing new concepts, approaches, methods, techniques, products, services, and ideas that can be used for the benefit of people and organizations. 
• Phronesis: Practical wisdom or prudence, is a crucial intellectual virtue that guides individuals in making sound moral decisions in practical matters. It’s not merely theoretical knowledge, but rather the ability to discern the best course of action in specific situations, considering the particular context and circumstances. This involves understanding what is good for humans and acting accordingly, blending reason, experience, and moral character. Phronesis is distinct from theoretical knowledge (episteme) and technical skill (techne). It’s not about knowing abstract principles but about applying them effectively in real-life situations. 
• SECI Model: Describes how explicit and tacit knowledge is generated, transferred, and recreated in organizations. Socialization (tacit to tacit) is the process of converting new tacit knowledge through shared experiences in day-to-day social interaction. Externalization (tacit to explicit) is a process whereby tacit knowledge is articulated into explicit knowledge so that it can be shared by others to become the basis of new knowledge. Combination (explicit to explicit) is a process whereby explicit knowledge is collected from inside or outside the organization and then combined, edited, or processed to form more complex and systematic explicit knowledge. The new explicit knowledge is then disseminated among the members of the organization. Internalization (explicit to tacit) is a process whereby explicit knowledge created and shared throughout an organization is then converted into tacit knowledge by individuals. This stage can be understood as praxis, where knowledge is applied and used in practical situations and becomes the basis for new routines. 

Nonaka-san created the following content. I have curated it to represent his contributions to the field. 

Books by Ikujiro Nonaka

SECI, Ba and Leadership: A Unified Model of Dynamic Knowledge Creation  

Figure 2.1 Knowledge created through a spiral 

Figure 2.4 Creating knowledge with outside constituents 

Figure 2.5 Ba as shared context in motion 

Figure 2.7 Four categories of knowledge asset 

 

Strategy as Distributed Phronesis 

 

Remembering Ikujiro Nonaka 

David Teece of Berkeley Haas: The breakthrough was his 1994 publication of “A Dynamic Theory of Organizational Knowledge Creation,” in Organization Science, which helped establish the field of knowledge management as a discipline. This was followed in 1995 by a book with his longtime friend and fellow Berkeley PhD Hirotaka Takeuchi, The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation. These works laid out the model of SECI (Socialization, Externalization, Combination, and Internalization) of how an organization creates benefits from the knowledge within its people only when that knowledge is shared in a spirit of collaboration in a virtuous cycle of collective knowledge creation to be guided by the distinct vision of its managers. While his own presentations tend toward the philosophical, others have been able to operationalize SECI in fields as diverse as information technology and healthcare. 

Henry Mintzberg of McGill University: Of Nonaka-san’s many influential publications, my favorite is his article “Toward Middle-Up-Down Management”, not only because it represents so pointedly the spirit of the Japanese approach to management that has had such profound impact on the practice of management in the West, but also because of the playful nature of the title—rare in the eminent journals of academe. Moreover, middle-up-down describes Nonaka-san’s work itself: “down:” his notion that knowledge flows from the experience of individuals; “up:’ carrying that into his general theory of organizational knowledge creation; and “middle:” referring to middle managers—like Nonaka-san himself, guiding the process. Nonaka-san took the initial inspiration of David Teece’s perspective on organizational knowledge and merged it through his own culturally Japanese perspective into a powerful framework of knowledge generation, which he introduced to America and the world.