Towards Scaffolding Collaborative Articulation and Alignment of Mental Models

Articulation and alignment of mental models has been recognized as an important issue in knowledge management over the last years. In the context of collaborative work processes, much research has been conducted in the field of how to facilitate such articulation and alignment activities to produce knowledge artifacts that appropriately represent organizational reality. However, the aspect of sustainably developing articulation and alignment capabilities for operative personnel has hardly been addressed so far. The article uses the educational concept of scaffolding to approach this problem. We review existing related work with a scaffolding lens and identify approaches that can be used to pursue scaffolding. We then report on a multiple case study we have conducted to identify potential for implementing different types of scaffolding in collaborative conceptual modeling activities for articulation and alignment. The results are used to show the potential value of scaffolding to trigger and support individual and collective learning processes in organizational problem solving processes as addressed by knowledge management research. The findings presented in the article allow to derive questions that should guide future research in this area.