Shared Knowledge: Eliminating the Ba

Thomas Schalow
University of Marketing and Distribution Sciences, Kobe, Japan
ijinkan@mac.com

Abstract: In one of the supreme ironies in ICT, social networking (SN)
companies such as Facebook, search engine (SE) companies such as
Google, and other major knowledge management (KM) organizations
continue to rely on Nonaka and Konnos (1998) Ba, or physical space,
for the internal creation and management of new ideas. Apparently,
these companies believe employees still need to congregate in a
physical place - an office - in order to share ideas, as opposed to
creating and sharing knowledge in a totally virtual environment. In this
theoretical exploration of physical space I propose that the next
challenge facing knowledge management is eliminating the Ba, and in
this paper we examine how that will facilitate the successful sharing of
knowledge in a world where place truly ceases to have meaning.

The challenge is formidable, because human beings still seem to require
a common time and place to meet in order to be synchronous. We see
this in all aspects of our lives, from our work offices to our educational
institutions. Although we have become adept at knowledge sharing in
virtual spaces in an asynchronous mode, we are still bound by the
chains of human culture and psychology in the synchronous mode. The
reason seems to be that we still rely on physical places to reference and
give organization to human societies, and thereby provide the conditions
for what sociologists refer to as homophily. Mkel et al (2007) have
shown that we still tend to share knowledge to a greater degree with
people who resemble us, or share our cultural identities, but Jameson
(2007) has shown that in a globalized world, where national borders
have become blurred, it can no longer be presumed that cultural identity
is equivalent to nation, or to some shared physical space. In fact, in
virtual spaces we need to accept that knowledge will increasingly be
created and shared by individuals who are not homophilous, as
discussed by Murthy (2013) in regard to Twitter, and therefore need to
adapt to a world without Ba.

Nonaka et al (2000) have identified four types of Ba: originating Ba,
dialoguing Ba, systemising Ba and exercising Ba. This paper will
look at each of these Ba and how they could be eliminated. Nonaka
has stated that although Ba resemble Wengers (1999) communities of
practice (CoPs), Ba need energy to operate, while communities of
practice remain functional, to some extent, even though they are neither
nurtured nor maintained. I believe it is this need for energy that limits the
Ba, and ultimately limits our ability to optimally engage in knowledge
sharing in a world where space and place holds less and less meaning
for more and more people. When we are finally able to expend less
energy clinging to our Ba, we will have more time and energy for
creating the knowledge and ideas that were the reasons people first
began to construct their Ba - their physical communities of practice - in
a time and place before the existence of what we now know as
cyberspace.

Keywords: knowledge management, communities of practice, virtual
environment, situational workplace, self-structuring, homophily

1. Introduction

The Indian economic historian Dharma Kumar is said to have joked that
Time is a device to prevent everything happening at once; space is a
device to prevent it all happening in Cambridge. (Hodgson, 2001) In the
immediate post-WW2 world there was little danger of everything
happening at Cambridge, with or without the confines of space, as the
geographic center of the world inexorably shifted to America. A recent
decision by top management at Yahoo to suspend the telecommuting
privileges of it employees seems designed to ensure that it will be the
office space at company headquarters in Sunnyvale, California that
defines the center of the world for knowledge creation and sharing,
within the time parameters of office hours between 9 am and 5 pm.

Yahoo is, of course, pursuing a very strict definition of the workplace as
a physical space where work is done. In past generations we referred to
this space as an office, factory, or workplace, but in the past two
decades it has become fashionable among knowledge management
scholars and consultants to speak of this space as a Ba - a term first
popularized by the Japanese scholar, Ikujiro Nonaka, along with Noboru
Konno (1998). Welsh scholar Dave Snowden (2000) has attempted to
put a Western, and specifically Welsh, face on the theory with the term
Cynefin, but the concept of a physical place where work is done
remains basically the same.
Nonaka, Toyama, and Konno (2000), in a subsequent interpretation of
Nonakas original idea, further divided their Ba into four distinct
categories. Echoing Adam Smiths ideas about the division of labor, they
identified an 1) originating Ba, where knowledge is created, a 2)
dialoguing Ba, where ideas can be discussed and refined, a 3)
systematizing Ba, where knowledge is embedded, and an 4) exercising
Ba, where ideas are translated into action. This very industrial age
interpretation, similar to Smiths observations about the production of
pins, sought to identify the place where each of these aspects of
knowledge creation or management would occur. In a nod to evolving
visions of virtual environments, Nonaka does suggest that the Ba need
not necessarily be physical, and Nordberg (2007) develops this concept
to its logical conclusion when he posits the space could even be virtual.
Even virtual space, though, retains the concept of place, where actors
come together to interact.

Place seems so important to us because it so often defines how we
perceive reality. Yet, it is not relevant to all aspects of our lives, and is a
concept we can dispense with if we choose. We do not normally
emphasize, for example, that we are breathing air from a particular
location, unless that air is significantly different from the air in another
location. We might emphasize or reference place when the air is
polluted, or thin, or particularly refreshing, but most of the time it is just
air. It surrounds us, and the place we choose to breathe it has little
significance. In fact, the air does not really exist in a place, as air does
not need to exist within boundaries, unless we choose to confine it and
impose the concept of location upon it. It is everywhere, and thus not in
any one place.

Eventually, we will see the network - what we today think of as the
Internet - in this manner. It will exist all around us, and we will exist within
it, and a sense of place will cease to be important, unless we choose to
define our location. At present we find location-based services useful, or
at least useful to companies trying to market their products to us.
Location provides structure, and structure allows for control. This is the
reason for Yahoos decision to require its workers to occupy a physical
space. Even most ICT companies are not yet comfortable with the
relatively modest idea of work being done in an unsupervised, virtual
environment. Without a physical realm in which to reign, management is
acutely aware of its fading value in a world where knowledge is created
beyond the traditional confines of time and space.

The fact that ideas about Ba and knowledge management within
physical work spaces have come from Japan will present no surprise to
students of Japanese social, economic and labor systems. Perhaps
more than any other system in the world, the Japanese system, social
and economic, stresses the importance of relationships nurtured by
physical presence as the key to cooperation and productivity. (Nakane,
1972 and Doi, 1981) Nonaka and Nishiguchi (2001) acknowledged this
when they said that sharing knowledge requires sharing the same
experience through joint activities such as being together, spending time,
or living in the same environment. In this context, an actual physical
space is a requirement for the creation and exchange of knowledge.

As both Nakane and Doi note, however, maintaining the Japanese social
structure, and harmony within the workplace, requires incredible inputs
of energy. Doi, in particular, has gone on to study the tremendous
psychological burden the need to maintain harmony via physical
presence places on Japanese workers. Companies that attempt to
control physical spaces also need to employ psychologists and
sociologists to minimize conflict, and thereby facilitate knowledge
sharing, within their physical space. Societies and nations need to
engage police and military forces to maintain control over their physical
spaces.

This attempt to control physical space produces tremendous pressures
as well as conflict. More importantly, the attempt to control physical
space is moving in the opposite direction of trends toward ad-hoc and
situational workplaces, where the idea of Ba is essentially irrelevant.
Even virtual working environments online schools and virtual offices,
for example - should be seen as representing a transitional phase that
will eventually fall out of favor. No matter how virtual the Ba becomes, it
nonetheless relies on a structured environment within which workers
interact. Social and economic developments, however, are pushing us
inexorably toward a free agent world, where it is the workers themselves,
and not knowledge managers, who decide how meaningful work is
accomplished. One could say that the workers will become knowledge
managers, but it would be more correct to say that the system will self-
structure, and the network itself will become the knowledge manager.
We are already seeing this trend toward self-structuring in Wengers
(1999) communities of practice (CoPs). Ad-hoc communities do not need
to expend the vast amounts of energy required by societies or nations to
maintain their membership, and could be constituted by methods not
requiring physical or even virtual spaces. Due to the focus of their
members, they can be better vehicles for sharing or creating knowledge
than the artificial creations expressed in the physical world through
societies or nations, without the need to enforce Nonakas requirement
for living in the same environment.

2. The network as a knowledge management device

If space is a device to prevent everything from happening in Cambridge,
the network is a device to eliminate the need for a human knowledge
manager. The self-structuring we are already beginning to see with Web
2.0 will continue to develop, as we move away from a need for human
beings to occupy a synchronous space-time nexus. Thousands of years
of social evolution have been preparing us for this new future beyond the
limits imposed by space and time. It began with communication at a
distance, allowing our knowledge, ideas, and even our spirit to be
transmitted in space, and eventually over time with the invention of the
written word, without the need for our physical presence at the point of
reception. By merely speaking, shouting, or broadcasting, we were able
to communicate our instructions to others, and thus share knowledge
beyond the limitations of our physical space. We are quite comfortable
with these forms of communication today, and it might therefore seem
somewhat surprising that we still apparently require sharing common
times and places for so much of our existence. We continue to depend
on schools as places for students to meet with teachers at a certain time.
Offices are places work is done by employees engaged to work between
certain hours. Factories are places where products are assembled over
fixed periods of time. Knowledge management theorists continue to
depend on the concept of place to refine their theories of knowledge.
(Kaiser and Fordinal, 2010) It is difficult for many of us to imagine a
world where perceived requirements for synchronous interaction in a
defined physical space could cease to be a factor in knowledge creation
and sharing.

Of course, some schools are now online, and some office workers have
the freedom to work from home. However, a key obstacle to the
continued growth of both online schools and telecommuting programs
arises with the issue of supervision. Monitoring even virtual spaces is
difficult, and supervising without the confines of space is perhaps
impossible. Yahoo recognized this problem, and chose to return to a
system that made supervision of employees easier, within the confines
of a defined workspace. Online schools dont have this option. No matter
how many safeguards are put in place in order to ensure that students
are doing required work on their own, or taking tests without outside
assistance, certain levels of trust and uncertainty remain embedded in
the system. In abandoning the Ba, or the place where knowledge
exchange takes place, online schools are also abandoning a great deal
of the supervision.

The online schools, of course, have in a sense substituted the physical
space of the classroom and examination halls for virtual equivalents. In
fact, they rely on this virtual space to assert the small degree of
supervision they yet control. The future of knowledge creation and
sharing, however, is not in virtual spaces, but in placeless, or at least ad-
hoc, and situational spaces. We no longer require space as a device to
prevent everything from happening in Cambridge. Everything can
happen anywhere, as well as everywhere, according to ones viewpoint.
The creation of knowledge, and even the sharing of that knowledge,
takes place in a context, and not a place. (Chun and de Alvarenga Neto,
2010)

3. High priests of knowledge and knowledge nomads

As human beings we need to physically exist in a place. However, we do
not need to inhabit that space, in the sense of becoming an inhabitant of,
or part of, that space. We may merely, and temporarily, occupy a space,
like the air we breathe, without assuming its attributes. Jameson (2007)
shows us that physical space does not need to translate into identity, in
the way that inhabitation would suggest. Like nomads, we could wander
over vast spaces without being tied down to the cultures or societies that
define those places, or even the conversations and knowledge
exchange we happened to be engaged in at the moment. We would not
need to be immediately and irrevocably defined by the cultures or
societies of the spaces we physically occupy.

Instead, we might choose to define ourselves by the events and
experiences we accumulate along our journey, unbound by spaces. The
ideas that we create, the knowledge that we share with others, would be
a product of the confluence of events and experiences that occur during
the time defined by our physical life. The seeds for our ideas could be
gathered from distant corners, and they would grow based on the
context in which they were planted.

The difference between the web as a context, and the web as a location,
is substantial. It is embodied in the difference between learning in a
classroom, and learning from a chance meeting with someone sharing a
different idea from our own. The knowledge that is created and shared in
a classroom presumably has been structured to some degree, with a
desire to yield a certain outcome. That outcome can be tested, and
supervised by a knowledge manager. The chance meeting, however,
has not been designed to yield any particular result. It cannot be
supervised, and might yield any result. It is the essence of creativity.

One of the most severe criticisms of Nonakas theory of Ba is that it
fails to identity the place where knowledge is created. As Nordberg
(2007) notes, providing a place for knowledge creation still falls short of
explaining how it is achieved. Before Nonaka, Luft and Ingram (1955)
confronted the same issue. Their Johari Window theory posited the
existence of four distinct quadrants where knowledge resided. They
suggested that it was the goal of group work to expand quadrant one,
the open area, involving behavior known to self and others, in order to
achieve knowledge creation. They presumed that this expansion of
quadrant one was to be at the expense of quadrant four, the unknown,
with things that are presently inaccessible to the individual or the group.
How that expansion actually occurred, however, and how new ideas
were actually created, was left unspoken.

Almost since the beginning of time it has been assumed that knowledge
managers were Gods instruments for the distribution and sharing of
knowledge. These managers became the high priests of knowledge, and
they retained their power by asserting that knowledge was bestowed
upon them alone, by the god of their knowledge structure. The people
over whom the priests, or ruling kings and queens supposedly anointed
by God, ruled, received knowledge from above, but did not create it. It
required a (Protestant) revolution to suggest that each and every person
was responsible for their own interpretation of the truth, their own
creation of knowledge.

Not even the Protestants, however, were willing to relinquish full control
of knowledge creation to the people. Societies still required people to be
supervised, and knowledge managers were still useful conduits for
sharing knowledge, and controlling populations. After all, how could
cities be planned, factories be organized on an industrial scale, and
societies and economies be harmonized without knowledge managers?
In fact, it did take knowledge managers to create Windows (Microsoft,
not Johari) juggernauts, and we will probably yet for many years require
high priests to keep our social, economic, and network systems
functioning in the manner to which we have become accustomed.
However, as systems such as Linux have demonstrated, it is possible to
create with minimal supervision. What the Internet has shown is that the
network can also grow organically. Eventually, the network itself will be
able to assume supervision of the digital nomads who will inhabit it, and
create the ideas that will push humanity into the future.

4. Knowledge as a confluence of events and experiences

This brings us back to the issue of how knowledge is created. For most
of human existence, we have been reminded of our need to occupy a
physical space in order to produce food, tools, or the products of our
everyday lives. Ideas and knowledge were assumed to require the same
physical space, though it was always recognized they seemed to come
from the ether, or perhaps the spirit of some Muse, even when they took
shape within the brain of a particular person, in a particular place. The
intuitive recognition that they were born out of the ether, however, should
have suggested they were not truly a product of a particular location,
and did not require a physical space to come into being. They merely
required a medium, which happened to be a human mind situated at a
particular space-time nexus. Knowledge creation, though, is essentially
free of space-time limitations. It coalesces as a result of context, but
does not depend on that context to self-generate. In other contexts it will
take different forms, but will retain its essential features.

What this means for knowledge creation and sharing is profound. When
we set knowledge free from the space-time that we have previously used
to define it, we will move beyond the structure that now limits our
attempts to push human evolution to its next level. Physical schools and
substantial factories may still continue to provide the vast majority of
people with the skills and products they need to survive in a physical
world, but true knowledge workers will need to be set free from these
physical limitations in order to produce the knowledge that will drive the
next stage in human evolution.

Evolution, of course, does not occur in a straight line, and at present
many soci et i es are wi t nessi ng a st rong backl ash agai nst
multiculturalism, and the perceived need for shared beliefs in a shared
physical space might seem to be our only hope to escape chaos and
destruction. Yet, a careful reading of history shows that it is actually the
tribalism that has characterized humanity for most of its time on this
earth that presents us with the greatest dangers and limitations. Within
our tribes we exhibit what sociologist refer to as homophily a love for
sameness, providing us with a convenient reference to define ourselves.
As Makela, Kalla, and Piekkan (2007) have shown, we still tend to share
knowledge, for the most part, with people who are like us in some
respect. One of the reasons this is true pertains to the simple matter of
language. Without the benefit of real-time translation we find it difficult to
share knowledge, or create it, with persons who use a language that is
unintelligible to us. Culture can also be an obstacle to the sharing of
knowledge perhaps even more than it has been a force for the creation
of knowledge. Not all cultures share basic values, and as a result they
may find it difficult to express or share those values with outsiders. If we
think about all the differences that divide one individual from another, we
might even conclude it is a wonder we manage to communicate any
knowledge at all. Our tendency toward homophily limits the creation and
sharing of knowledge at least as much as it facilitates it.

Yet, as we move beyond the limitations imposed by our languages, our
cultures, our religions, and our basic beliefs, we find there is indeed
much we wish to share, or need to share, in order to grow and prosper.
In the virtual Twitter space we can come together with people who are
quite different from ourselves in order to share those things that matter
to us, as Murthy (2013) has shown. Facebook connects us with friends,
or at least acquaintances, from all over the world. Google makes it
possible to find information in languages we are not fluent in, and
thereby exposes us to views we may never have otherwise considered.
Space has in the past defined us, and limited us. We can anticipate an
explosion of knowledge creation and sharing when space becomes
irrelevant to what we aspire to be and know, and knowledge becomes a
confluence of events and experiences.

5. In conclusion

It is ironic that Yahoo, and other companies which profess to be
knowledge companies, should be seeking to define the conditions and
places where knowledge can be created. What this should tell us is that
these companies have ceased to be innovators, and are now in the
business of controlling their virtual realm. They may be mighty kings and
queens at present, but they will eventually prove irrelevant to the future
history of humanity.

Our theoretical examination of the concept of space has shown that
physical realms, whether corporate or national, will eventually become
unimportant to humanity. We will no longer define ourselves by our
location, and our knowledge will also be set free from the limitations of
space and time. Knowledge creation will take place in an ether
undefined by space. We will be bathed in new ideas, innovations, and
knowledge, just as we are bathed in the air that nourishes our existence.
Maintaining a physical presence in a specific location requires
tremendous inputs of energy. Today we find it relatively difficult to create
knowledge because we expend so much energy in merely maintaining
our attachment to locations defined by languages, cultures, beliefs, and
relationships. When humanity becomes nomadic, like the wind, it will be
free to flow in entirely new directions, with only minimal inputs of energy.
Creativity will become the essence of our universe.

The new world, undefined by physical location, will need to be self-
structuring in order for there to be any meaning to whatever is created.
Meaning will come into being spontaneously, and most often merely
temporarily. Maintaining meaning for long periods of time merely
requires too much energy, and is unimportant for defining where
humanity is moving. In this self-structuring confluence of events,
experiences, and knowledge, knowledge managers will become
superfluous, and perhaps even obstacles to further growth. The system
will provide all the supervision and structure needed to manage the
knowledge that is created.
Of course, we can expect a great deal of protest and resistance from
todays knowledge managers as we move toward this more democratic
world, where knowledge creation no longer relies on the humbug of Ba.
Context will replace space as the creative force, and knowledge creation
and exchange will eventually become freeform. There will be no optimal
outcomes to be measured or supervised only possibilities. Each
outcome will be valid in its own way, and there will no longer be any
need for space to define who we are, what we believe, and what we can
create. When we are able to recognize the implications of this statement,
we will be ready to unleash a tremendous force for the creation and
exchange of new knowledge.

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