Interview transcript:
Raysa Rocha: Wild capitalism is like letting a child loose in a candy shop with the parent’s credit card. So you can have an interesting short-term outcome, but long term, the lack of regulation, the lack of consideration for the long-term perspective would bring harm.
Wisdom is such an old construct. Practical wisdom is so ancient, but it can be applied and if you apply [it], you can create shared values to the company, and the community and the employees and the consumers. But being aware that how you manage will influence how you innovate, what kind of products, how you will even communicate with your clients and your other stakeholders.
I'm Raysa Rocha. I'm a lecturer at the University of Essex and Assistant Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
Most of my work is related to teaching, ethics, OB [organizational behavior], and projects related to entrepreneurship, wisdom, and ethics in different settings.
Jean Matelski Boulware: Can you talk a bit about knowledge management and a value-based approach? And then some of the tenets of wisdom and how they fit together with knowledge management?
Rocha: Okay, time for the joke.
[both laugh]
Rocha: So I would say that knowledge management is like trying to herd cats if cats were morphing into different animals constantly.
[both laugh]
Rocha: But in terms of knowledge management, it's a whole system within companies, related to the creation, acquisition, memory retainment, usage of knowledge in a way to create and enhance performance, shared value. Efficient knowledge management process in the organization would be to enhance and create better or different competitive advantages.
And I would say that this process, it's not only about information management: You have a huge database and everyone is uploading information there and someone goes there and check when they need, or they think they need. It's more about having a whole ecosystem where the knowledge can flow within the organization and create value as a river would do when it runs into the sea.
When we discuss how to do responsible knowledge management, we are discussing how to up KM [knowledge management] from a technical endeavor to a more holistic one: considering long term perspectives, considering responsibility and sustainability in creating this process inside the organizations. So it would be like bringing ethical considerations in stakeholder inclusivity, connection with the organizational culture, integration with the mission and the values of the organization, creating spaces for reflection also and learning. Keeping the employees interested in improving their decision-making skills, because to… in terms of knowledge management would be where to find this knowledge, with which person should I go when I need some kind of information? How I can make sense of this information to use when I need it? And also, what will be the impact of this decision? The knowledge the person is using to make this decision.
So it's trying to make the whole process, the whole systems that manage the knowledge within an organization wiser.
Boulware: Do you find that companies are receptive to applying practical wisdom to knowledge management?
Rocha: I will say that depends on the approach…and if you call it practical wisdom- maybe not.
[both laugh]
Rocha: Because they will think of philosophy. ‘So I will bring philosophy to my business?’
But trying to use other terminologies as Professor [Durst] did with responsible knowledge management, I think that is a way to bring wisdom without sometimes using the terminology wisdom.
And in this sense, we wanted to bring, and say wisdom is such an old construct. Practical wisdom is so ancient, but it can be applied. And if you apply [it], you can create shared values to the company and the community and the employees and the consumers, because it's necessary not to manage knowledge as if it was an object in a company.
But being aware that how you manage will influence how you innovate, what kind of products, how you will even communicate with your clients and your other stakeholders.
Boulware: I'm curious about the role of artificial intelligence in knowledge management.
Rocha: Most of the companies in most of the countries, they don't have experts in AI. But yes, it can be used and should be used to improve the knowledge flow because it would be like an assistant.
So I believe that, if companies have their own AI so employees could have this interaction would be like having a colleague that could improve find where some knowledge can be found in the company in an easier and faster way, but also sometimes diminishing the knowledge risk -like the risk of the company to lose knowledge due to technology change, employee retirement or turnover. This kind of situation where a company can lose an expert or a company could diminish their competitive advantage. I think that I could improve this relationship, no doubt.
if we think that, I don't know, 95% of Europeans companies are family business or most of companies…and large part of them are SMEs [small and medium enterprises]… so having the possibility today, it would be to use the free version or the generic version, but not a version made for them. So probably the big companies, the unicorns, they can have this more easily done, let's say, because of the resources.
Boulware: So you have another paper called Phronetic Workplace, can you tell us a little bit about workplace spirituality and workplace phronesis, and how to divert away from wild capitalism?
Rocha: So try another joke here.
[both laugh]
Rocha: I would say that wild capitalism is like letting a child loose in a candy store with the parent’s credit card. So the lack of regulation & the lack of awareness would bring harmful consequences. So in a capitalist society, where companies don't have regulations and they are lacking this guidance on social and environmental considerations, lacking the long-term perspective, can bring harm to society, to people, and also to business.
And in this paper, the Phronetic Workplace, we discuss the perspectives of workplace spirituality and how they are infusing and fostering practical wisdom within the workplace.
Having the leader buy in this idea of how important the members’ spiritual well-being is for the wellness of the organization and the workplace would be one of the primary requirements. But then having, again, the spaces for reflection, creating the bar -the shared space…because it's in this kind of space that people connect. That love, affection, respect, trust will rise and these are all needs for a better knowledge flow, for a better collective wisdom to arise.
So people need to connect. And if they don't connect properly, [it] doesn't matter if I have 1 or 2 wise people in my workplace. People that are constantly learning and reflecting and thinking long term and acquiring new knowledge and considering other people's, the common good in their decision making.
So it's necessary that these few people, they are already becoming wiser and wiser that they can spread their wisdom over the organization. And we feel that increasing, improving, embracing workplace spirituality will be a means for that. This is the major argument in that paper. We bring a more conceptual kind of philosophical view of how this would happen, because it's mostly about how people will connect with this purpose of becoming wise together with the goal of having better decisions and better outcomes from these decisions.
Boulware: How do we get there? How do we get to a point where we have a company decide, ‘okay, I want to incorporate more workplace spirituality, more workplace wisdom.’ What's that first step?
Rocha: I believe that the first step is with a leader. When the person in charge of the company has this goal. I would say initially for their own like personal goal to embrace their own spirituality and become wiser. They see it as a possibility for the whole company, for the employees, for the followers. That doesn't matter if it's the person that's watering the plants or if is the middle manager. You know, everyone can have their contribution every day in how to become wise and how to make the workplace and the whole organization wise.
After that, as a leader, if I was the leader, I would bring people to my company aligned with this perspective.
And people that are already in the company, I would use communication. I would call on my influence as a leader to bring them to the same vision that being wiser every day is important not only for us as people, but also for society.
But also creating a mindset of what the wise organization is for my organization, for my industry, for my country, for my neighborhood. What…how is this picture? So it's necessary self-assessment of the company for the company that already exists. Or if it's a new one, this co-creation of how I would create a business that is practically wise in this specific context.
Then, I would say that having some metrics -like we have a lot of service for organizational culture, for organizational climate - so having some metrics to see how this is evolving within the company and how the employees are feeling and receiving and acting on it. Also piloting small initiatives inside the company to address the results of these metrics. So what are my goal?
It's very contextual. So when we are talking in generic terms, [it] could seem intangible. But we need to go and see one company and address specifically each of these dimensions. So having a purpose, a long-term purpose, that is connected to the flourishing of the organization and the community -having these long-term goals that consider, of course, profit, but environmental and social, perspectives as well. And this growth mindset would change the workplace step by step.
And it's not a drastic change. Everything at once. It's very additive. So if you want to have a wise organization, you need to buckle up, yes, you know. Yeah, it's a journey. It's quite a journey.
Boulware: Are there – do you have any- I don't know if you do -any unicorns out there- big or small - of organizations that you've seen in your work that exemplify this phronetic workspace?
Rocha: No, I never seen in my work. I saw in some research, I saw some cases. And it's something that we want to try to find.
Specifically in terms of research to create an archetype, a profile of what would be in certain industries, in certain contexts. It's something that we are aiming to do for a few years.
We try to connect with some companies. But there is, I would say, a barrier when we talk about spirituality and wisdom in some contexts. So people think that's always esoteric.
Well, we are trying to overcome this challenge and trying to build strong partnerships for that. And one way that we are envisioning to build this, let's say phronetic workplace and trying to connect with business is through a game that we developed, the Wise Up game.
So we have this Erasmus project: the Wise Up 2 Succeed.
It is am educational project. So we envision to teach practical wisdom to business assessors and even BA students that have some experience and leaders and people that want to become entrepreneurs.
So we are trying to get there through education…so creating learning spaces where people can learn and practice how to become wiser. And we thought that besides the old PowerPoint curriculum…nananana…that we also made, okay, that we would like to have something fun - something that would make people also laugh and be relaxed while learning about practical wisdom.
So we developed this game. We had a pilot in the UK. We are going to have some workshops next month in Iceland, Austria and Portugal, in October in the Netherlands. So we are spreading the game and the project in a way that we can.
Boulware: Is there anything else that we didn't touch on that you think is important?
Rocha: I would say that reorganizing the organizational structure. So there are some structures that will hinder the development of practical wisdom, some bureaucratic structures. So rearranging the corporate furniture would be important to develop practical wisdom as well.
Boulware: Can you give us an example of a structure that would hinder organizational wisdom?
Rocha: For example, if you have several departments that don't touch base with each other. They don't share what they are doing, that make decisions without considering and connecting to other departments. And this is like a structured way of working. Imagine that you are the sales department is making a promotion without contacting with the supply chain. And if they don't have this connection or if this connection is broken or there are some noise in between this connection, because of the bureaucracy, because of the way that this organization is structured. This would hinder the development of practical wisdom.
Boulware: How is that practical wisdom as opposed to just efficiency?
Rocha: Because there is the consideration of the common good. You can be efficient without considering the common good. You can be efficient - efficient only for you, only for your department, only for your company. Your company will make millions, but it will harm the ambiance. It will harm the employees. Burn out, people leaving, you know, products that are that are doing harm for kids and for the environment.
It should be efficient and effective. And then the outcome needs to consider the common good, the good for the person that's making the decision and the others. So it's not only about having a good outcome for the person that's making the decision, but it's considering the community as well.
