On heuristics, narrative and knowledge management

This article is based on comments delivered by Laurence Pruzak at a meeting of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development at the University of Ottawa in November, 2007. We discuss heuristics of knowledge management and how they close the gap between the theories that drive the academic activity of knowledge management—Prof. de la Mothe's discipline—and the work of practitioners in the field. We do this by providing narrative examples of these basic practices in order to demonstrate the value of narrative itself to the practice of knowledge management. We find that there is trans-disciplinary pedagogic value in narrative form, which enhances our understanding of knowledge management and shapes our approaches to future research in the discipline. On a practical level, these comments rehearse how a historical approach to rhetoric informs contemporary group dynamics and organizational hierarchy; how rhetoric and narrative become factors in the management of information flow and systems, organizational strategy, and leadership; and how they affect our understanding of space, time and emotional investment in work. As knowledge management increases in importance in terms of business processes and advantage, we are increasingly reliant on proxies for measurement and non-empirical skills and behaviors such as judgment, creativity and imagination.