On Wed, 21 Jun 1995, Doug Reeler wrote:
> I have long contended that adminstrators, secretaries and such jobs are
> grossly undervalued particularly as people in these positions are at the
> hub of the communication networks and filter huge amounts of information,
> building up an unvalued wealth of knowledge. Allied to this,
> administrators are keyed into the corridors, the informal life and gossip
> more than any others - yet this access is seen as unimportant or even as
> negative. The potential for enriching the culture of the organisation at
> this level is enormous and I suspect that administrators can play a key
> leadership role.
Yeah, a compelling idea. Picture urging this at a general get-together of
such workers. The difficult -- the humanly difficult -- point is to let
people become aware of this aspect of their daily roles without becoming
"self-conscious" about it. This touches on a couple of threads that have
been active over the past several days: about discussing the group conduct
while the group conducts its ordinary business.
You see the problem here? It's that dreadful discontinuity in thought and
conduct that self-consciousness (or even: self-awareness) induces. As
though the only appropriate response, when we see the importance of our
role, is to form a union and go find somebody to bargain with.
But it's _got_ to be possible to get past that moment. Maybe
one-on-one's, small groups, game-playing...
Stories?
Another point of concurrence: I heartily believe that most of the
effective "knowledge" that resides in a business entity is in the hands of
the people you are referring to: the secretaries, the administrators, the
assistants. All of the people whose role is manifestly _not_ to make
decisions. In an organic ("holistic") image, these people are the
perceptual processes, the autonomic nervous system, the viscera. It is
here that the sickness and health of the organism reside; the "conceptual"
knowledge up in the brain centers can do no more than to articulate what
these provide.
And finally, picking up a thread from several months ago, how, in a
corporate knowledge repository, can we represent this knowledge without
particularly trying to articulate it or conceptualize it. There has to be
a way to represent _emergent_ knowledge: knowledge that arises from its
atomic constituents in ways that those very constituents cannot predict or
(individually) control.
--
Regards
Jim Michmerhuizen
web residence at http://world.std.com/~jamzen/
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. . . . There are far *fewer* things in heaven and earth, Horatio, . . . .
. . . . . than are dreamt of in your philosophy... . . | _ .