Module 4 - Step 3: Identifying the members: Who should belong?

Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.
- Peter Drucker

All organizations do knowledge work!

1) Organizations must have a system principle or a reason for being-a purpose. In the case of a family, the system principle is to provide emotional and financial support and/or raise children. In the case of a non-profit organization, the mission is to provide service or education. In a business, the system principle is the provision of goods or services for profit.   A collaborative must have a system principle or a purpose too.

2) Organizations manage knowledge to achieve desired results -- knowledge being a critical mass of information looked at through the lens of experience and critical thinking, which enables us to predict and control something.   Collaboratives are also a means to assemble knowledge.

3) Organizations are comprised of knowledge specialists and generalists who manage the interface between knowledge specialties. Bits of knowledge by themselves are sterile. They become productive only if welded together into a useful body of knowledge. To make this transformation of knowledge possible is the central task for the organization.  In other words, the work of the organization is to add value to incoming information gleaned from its workers, its customers/clients and its environment, and then transform this into the output of a service or product.  If there is not a value added process or transformation, then there is no work and no authentic organization.  In the case of a family the transformation of knowledge results in meeting the needs of family members, emotionally as well as financially.

4) A collaborative (trans-organizational system) manages knowledge too. It must be managed in a similar fashion to any organization comprised of specialists.  But with collaboratives, instead of employee specialists, the member organizations are the knowledge specialists. The specialist knowledge is not necessarily the knowledge of an academic discipline but can also be the voice of lived experience by a particular constituency and in the case of an NPO can be their knowledge of service provision to their client base.  The knowledge inputs that are needed depends on the analysis assumed of the problem by the process convener and who the convenor (might be a convening committee) identifies as a potential member of the collaborative. Therein lies the fatal flaw of the whole process. For who gets to play in the game determines the eventual direction of the outcome. As computer engineers say “garbage in and garbage out” (GIGO). The saying is commonly used to describe failures in human decision making due to faulty, incomplete, or imprecise data.

The purpose of a collaborative is to create and implement a strategy for a complex problem. The work process is one of continuous decision-making. If the knowledge resources invited to participate in the process provide incomplete or inaccurate data , the decisions and new knowledge (incorporated into a plan) will not be effective.