Exchanging 'payload' knowledge: interpersonal knowledge exchange within consulting communities of practice
Creators: name: McKenzie, Kevin M.
Publisher: name: Swinburne
Year: 2024

description: Knowledge Management has evolved over time into the domain of Information Technology (IT), where codification, storage and retrieval of explicit knowledge is believed to lead to a competitive advantage for an organisation. More recently, knowledge management literature has suggested that knowledge is socially constructed and inseparable from the communities of practice in which it is held. This dissertation examines the interpersonal process by which payload knowledge (a concept that emerged from the research data as comprising that specific distillation of knowledge, both tacit and explicit, required to resolve an applied problem in context) is exchanged in a consulting firm's communities of practice. Through a qualitative case study design involving sixteen in-depth interviews with consultants from a medium sized consulting firm, the nature of the interpersonal knowledge exchange process was illuminated. In this study, two inter-related research questions were addressed: What is the interpersonal process by which knowledge is exchanged between consultants? And, Why do consultants prefer to participate in the interpersonal knowledge exchange process in preference to using stored explicit knowledge? This detailed examination of consultants as knowledge workers, resulted in the proposal of a process based model of interpersonal knowledge exchange. Utilising the concept of payload knowledge, the interpersonal knowledge exchange process is shown to be predicable in terms of passing through eight identifiable stages, yet unpredictable in terms of knowing how each community interaction will lead to payload knowledge. Within this process, the sourcing, handover, distillation and implementation of payload knowledge are seen as an artistic endeavour, characterised by social community based exchanges that 'hop' the consultants toward their specific contextual need. Key advantages of this interpersonal process are the decontextualisation and recontextualisation processes carried out at both the request negotiation stage and the knowledge handover stage. This process uses the community's shared language, mental models, social etiquette and cultural norms to compress and funnel the meaning of the payload knowledge into a form that can be transferred meaningfully to a requesting consultant. Through participating in the interpersonal knowledge exchange process, consultants save time, and are provided with an opportunity to confirm their personal knowledge as up-to-date and relevant to the specific context. By using the interpersonal process, consultants conform with and confirm the community's social etiquette, which dictates its preference for the identified exchange mechanism. The interpersonal process allows them to practice and learn the consulting community's professional artistry and, in consequence, to enjoy the exchange experience, and to have fun. This dissertation contributes to making one aspect of the interpersonal knowledge exchange process explicit. The process, by its very nature however, appears to remain tacitly understood by those within the consulting community of practice. Through understanding the process and the reasons that consultants prefer to engage in interpersonal knowledge exchange processes, it is anticipated that managers will be better able to produce a knowledge-based sustainable competitive advantage for their firms.