Soft Thinking and Intellectual Capital

draw flesh University of Glamorgan MSc International Logistics and Transport course of instruction/ strategical Procurement counselling strategy AS PRACTICE yielding outlines opinion and reason Capital Assignment 1 *Student No *08193738 Assignment go steady 5 April 2009 *Submission Date* 15 May 2009 Module Lecturer peachy of Minnesota Davis Word Count* * *2,* 600 Critically judge the role that buggy Systems idea dismiss play in promoting physical compositions smart Capital.To quantify the benefits of diffuse Systems Thinking (SST) in promoting an geological formational ingenious uppercase it is necessary to on a lower floorstand the creation of Soft Systems methodological analysis and how this methodology jakes be used to foster teamwork, communities of origin and affable breeding, and whether these tuition egresss confers familiarity to employees, and leads to change professional exercise and efficacy. So what nourish do you put on controling and as an intangible summation does it make to be measured to promote talented Capital (IC) to support the effective bringing of strategic goals by foc utilize focus activities and processes.Andriessen (2004). Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) advocated by Checkland and Scholes (1990) is a methodology ground on applying brasss opinion to non system situations. It is a holistic path of dealing non with the chore b bely the situation in where there be affable, political and valet de chambre activities Checkland and Scholes (1990). As contrasted to hard system methodologies, which bottom be quantified, measured and be technology orientated. Soft Systems takes a ag ag concourse of actors through and through with(predicate) a process of a overlap problem appreciation. eruditeness much than or less the problem, then formulating a root definition of interrelated systems, these leaven the relationships of the relevant subsystem which atomic number 18 the stakeholde rs, untold(prenominal) as customers, employees, the worldview (weltanschauungen) and the concern who ar all fighting(a) in the system and take corporate action to improve the situation Checkland (1981) Senge (1990) in any case describes systems idea as having five learning watchs, personal mastery, me_ntal models, sh ard vision, team learning, and the overarching discipline of systems thinking. therefore, soft systems thinking is a ray that helps in the solving of problems involving human activities where the out go down is learning. Soft systems thinking rotter enable subjective lights of problems and wantly solutions. Checkland and Scholes (1990). There are a number of divergent issues and getes that bottomland be used to trail a framework for the application of systems thinking for promoting the intellectual roof of any organic law.Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) advocated by Checkland and Scholes (1990) helps to procure a clearer thought of organisational issues and problem situations, as it approaches issues holistically. System thinking is a discipline for try oning wholes, recognizing patterns and interrelationships, and learning how to structure those relationships in a more than effective and efficient mode Senge and Lannon-Kim (1991. Therefore, do byrs having a range of skills and association shadow add survey to any improvement initiative. go up and Haynes (2001) girded and used the methodology in a number of settings in the NHS and Iles and Sunderland (2001) cited the potential of SSM as an aid to implementing organisational change initiatives at Kings College Hospital capital of the United Kingdom. (Iles and Sunderland, 200135) Soft systems thinking stomach help organisations to spud new perspectives, as it accounts for factors that otherwise would be ignored.A human activity system, groundwork compliment strategic frameworks, such as the Balance Scorecard to co-ordinate telephone line activities and improve internal and external communications. Kaplan and Norton (1992) However, humanness view problems polarly because they come from contrastive backgrounds, and give up different cultural roots, experience, and education, and as a subsystem, different personalities and philosophies to life.Therefore if a group of managers at different charge levels and different departments are all touch on in a complex problem situation, SST maybe an excellent ray of light to create a conceptual accord of a problem, but it does not trifle the real world, but by using system rules and principles it allows thinking to be structured, to develop some models, and the situation can be expressed as a abundant picture Checkland, (1981) Checkland and Scholes (1990) Although, Checkland (1999) contrasts with the emphasis on reductionists thinking on obvious problems with definite solutions. commonwealth interpret problem situations from particular standpoints and in terms of distinctive interests. Fortu ne and Peters (1995) speaks about complex discursive networks challenging the understanding of systems, problems and solutions to problems. This system of relationships betwixt tribe, activities, and the world is be by beat and Wenger (1991), as a Community of Practice, (CoP) which develops over while and in relation to other central and overlap communities of hold and is a fundamental tick off for the existence of fellowship.The approach focuses on the complaisant interactive dimensions of situated learning. As people in the group interact with each other, pass watering a relationship through mutual engagement and a feel of unificationt enterprise. Wenger (2000) describes three modes of belonging to a loving learning system, as engagement, vagary and alignment. These cannot be formed, but pack to evolve overtime, as new members join and others leave. So how can organisations like the NHS establish communities of practice?Brown and Duguid (2001a) hints managers can seek to structure spontaneity, structuring fragmented practice crossways the organisation, they can encourage alignments of changing practices between communities thereby assisting the canalise of cognition crossways the organisation. (Brown and Duguid 2001a). An equally important view has emerged under the banner of the familiarity-based view of the firm (Grant 1996), emphasises the necessity of organisations to develop and maturation the experience and learning capabilities of employees through intimacy gaining, cognition sharing, and acquaintance take out, to achieve free-enterprise(a) advantage.To take it further swish and Wenger (1991) saw the gaining of friendship as a social process, in which people participated in communal learning, but at different levels depending on their authority in the group. It is the touchd commitment that binds the members of the CoP in a single social entity, and although members of the CoP fig up tangible communal resources, such as write files, procedures, processes and policies, (hard companionship) intangible resources are in like manner being built up such as experiences rituals and idioms (soft cognition).Hildreth and Kimble (2002) argued that the underlying problems of managing this knowledge was that acquaintance caution (KM) failed to recognise that knowledge itself consists of both hard and soft knowledge, much like the Chinese concepts of Yin and Yan and are mutually interdependent. acquaintance by itself produces nothing and when it is integrated into a task does knowledge benefit society. (Drucker 1992) Hislop (2004) examined three cases studies of CoPs in large European organisations and think that unaccompanied one was successful in sharing knowledge between communities. The other two failed to do so because they did not share the same identity. So it could be concluded that although CoPs are self controlled and self directed, and maybe of pass judgment to the barter organisation, t he certain benefit and division to the organisation could also be uncertain.Maybe, because group solidarity in human communities, is often at the price of hostility/non-cooperation towards non-group members. There appears to be a natural human lean for dividing the world into friends and enemies that is the basis of all politics. (Fukuyama, 1995) So knowledge maybe personified in apparently in the experiences of a community of practitioners in an organisation or explicitly in the written files, but noesis Management (KM) is a amateural task for any organisation. diminution tacit knowledge into numbers the organisation stands to lose money, although knowledge can be safely stored on computer systems the actual value could be lost if an employee leaves with the tacit knowledge on how to use the explicit knowledge. Employee retention/turnover is important as downsizing and retirement can cause a loss of shared knowledge and knowledge could be transferred to competitors and be al ter to an organisations competitive advantage. (Stovel and Bontis (2002).Stovel and Bontis (2002) also advocate that productiveness will drop for a time due to the learning curve gnarly as new employees gain the knowledge of the tasks involved and understands and learns from the organisational culture. teaching and data can be stored but it is not until it has been impact in the minds of an individual and is communicated to others does it become knowledge (Alavi and Leidener 2001) so to make tacit knowledge explicit, there has to be knowledge transfer. familiarity transfer in align and between organisations is not a one-way activity, but a process of trial and error, feedback, and mutual qualifying of both the source and the recipient (Von Krogh, 2003 373). There train been a number of studies which have got shown that some of the benefits of knowledge sharing/transfer can help solve problems and increase carrying out, adaptation, collaboration and innovation. (Constant, Spro ull and Kiesler, 1996 Brown and Duguid, 2000).However, there is a great deal of literature on knowledge management and innumerable definitions of knowledge and what knowledge is, Blackler (1995) describes knowledge as multifarious and complex, being both situated and abstract, covert and explicit, distributed and individual, physical and mental, developing and static, verbal and encoded. musical composition Fowler and Prykes (2003) views the more human instalment of knowledge as much the perception arising from discipline and refracted through the individuals personal lens.Whereas, acquaintance Management Systems refers to information systems, particularly with the use of technology, which is follow and designed to support employees, there is an appear awareness that there is a social element to the area of knowledge management, which focuses on a more human centred approach, as a means of managing knowledge in organisations (Hildreth et el 1999) It is now recognised that the performance of any organisation, private and public is actually much dependent upon the knowledge of the employees.But, it is the social element or the concept of social with child(p) and its role in knowledge management for developing and gaining competitive advantage, and more broadly intellectual capital (IC) popularised by Stewart in Fortune magazine (1994) which has relational elements and comprises of human capital, structural capital, and organisational capital (Edvinsson and Malone, 1997 Stewart, 1997 Sveiby, 1997 Guthrie and Petty, 2000) and is viewed also as being central to the sustainability of competitive advantage.Edvinson and Malone (1997) be human_ capital_ as the value of everything that leaves the troupe at five p. m. That is to say that only when the shared knowledge additions or the _structural _capital only remains, when employees walk out through the door. friendly capital can be defined as a set of light values or norms shared among members of a gro up that permits them to cooperate with one another. If members of the group come to expect that others will lead reliably and honestly, then they will come to trust one another.Trust acts like a lubricant that makes any group or organisation run more efficiently. (Fukuyama, 1999, p16) With trust and the co-operation in groups and the social interactions based on informal communication, the building of networks can have economic benefits, with the creation of railway line opportunities through networking as trust reduces the be of contracts and legal actions and shared values can make negotiations more successful. Social capital may also create business opportunities by facilitating and exchanging semi confidential information and mutual ncouragement. (Glaser, Edward L. , Laibson, David, and Sacerdote, Bruce 2002), capable Capital is the intangible economic value of organisational capital (structures, processes and culture) and human capital (skills, doings and knowledge) and it is the intangible asset of knowledge that is now being added to the undefiled production factors of land labour and capital. return and innovation are now relying on the intellectual capital /knowledge of an organisation, and how it uses the knowledge to compete in the market (Kim and Mauborgine (1999).The knit of intellectual capital stems from the need of organisations to have to quantify assets. So efficient management of intellectual capital is directly conjugate to measurement and evaluation (Andrieseen 2004) and has necessitated the introduction of insurance coverage and valuations models for IC (Liebowitz and Suen 2000) and as the literature suggest the most popular measure of IC is the difference between the market value and the book value of a knowledge based firm (Brennan and Connell 2000. ) According to (Tuban and Aronson 2001) Knowledge is critically important because as an asset it appreciates rather than depreciates.Knowledge increases so intellectual capital is going to improve. So by using systems thinking to promote Intellectual Capital could be a aright approach for understanding the record of problems situations and the way they are dealt with and how to go about modify results. The key benefit of the system is that it involves visual perception the whole picture and creates insights to problems and can raise the way that communities of practice can co-operate and learn through shared knowledge and experiences.System thinking is not an easy approach as it requires a substantial enthronement of effort, and thought, though the results can be more than worth the investment. Central to these ideas is that intellectual capital is embedded in both people and systems. The stock of human capital consists of humans (the knowledge skills and abilities of people) social (the valuable relationships among people) and organisational (the processes and routines within the firm) (Wright et al 2001716).But there are criticisms of Soft Thinks Th inking as the system is unable to deal with conflicting spirit of social systems, and that it is a conceptual methodology and does not represent the real world, and the methodology implies that actors in a situation have the freedom to instigate change and that conflict does exist but the methodology relies on compromise. Douglas and MacGregor 1960 in his book Human side of Enterprise maintained that there are two fundamental approaches to managing people. Many managers be towards supposition x, and generally get poor people results.Enlightened managers use theory y, which produces intermit performance and results, and allows people to grow and develop. Which demonstrates that you cant legislate for human behaviour and those humans also by nature can be territorial and will protect their domain, by advocating knowledge is post. Lave and Wenger (1991) fail to explore the implications of the distribution of power when discussing CoP and Marshall and Rollinson (2004) suggests tha t Lave and Wenger ( 1991) discussions of sum can be misinterpreted as as well quiescent and consensual while in reality such activities are plagued by misunderstanding and disagreements.Without trust the members of the community of practice may be reluctant to share knowledge, and may become static in terms of their knowledge base be resistant to change. There are limitations to the communities of practice but, its does allow the means to explore the transfer of tacit knowledge management tools rivet on the codification of knowledge. But a community of practice is one of a number of knowledge management tools, and different organisations require different tools.Other tools maybe needed to be developed to manage tacit knowledge as from the critic that soft thinking systems may not always be appropriate as a knowledge management tool. References Alavi, M. and D. Leidner 2001 Knowledge Management and Knowledge Management Systems abstract Foundations and Research Issues MIS Quarterl y 25(1) 107-136 Andriessen, D. (2004). IC valuation and measurement classifying the state of the art. journal of Intellectual Capital, 5, 230-242. Blacker F (1995) Knowledge, Knowledge work and organisations An overview and interpretation, governing Studies 16 (6) Bontis, N. 1998). Intellectual capital an preliminary study that develops measures and models. Management Decision, 36, 63-76. Bontis, N. (2002). 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